One year later: Family still seeking answers for 11-year-old Adrianna Younge’s death

One year after 11-year-old Adrianna Younge’s death, her relatives continue to demand justice while holding onto the premise that she was killed under mysterious circumstances. The young girl’s body was found almost 24 hours after she went missing during an outing at the Double Day Hotel, Tuschen, East Bank Essequibo (EBE). Her body was found floating in the pool under questionable circumstances.

The discovery sparked fiery protests by angry residents and relatives, during which the hotel and the owners’ home were destroyed by fire. Little Adrianna had accompanied her grandmother and other relatives to the facility. One year later, her mother, Amecia Simon, spoke with Newsource, demanding justice for her daughter’s death. Speaking about her grief, Simon said she is trying to cope with the loss.
“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s easy. I would just say that I try to live with it because you have to live with the fact that she’s not here anymore, the fact that she was taken in such a gruesome way, and the fact that you’re not hearing or getting any closer to closure. I would give anything for her because she was humble and she didn’t deserve anything like this.”

The mother still believes that there was sufficient information available to hold individuals accountable, identify those involved and determine who took her and where she had been, but nothing was done. “Adrianna deserves justice. Yes, she deserves justice. The worst has already happened, but at this point, she deserves justice. Her parents deserve justice. Her siblings deserve justice. She was not in the pool, nor at the bottom of that pool, so it is impossible,” she stated.
The grieving mother continues to raise several unanswered questions. “Who had her? Who called her? And regarding who called her, it can’t be a stranger because she is not a child who could be called away or taken by someone she does not know. Even if she drowned, where did she drown? Who drowned her? You know, because she wasn’t there. She wasn’t there.”
Only recently, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Shalimar Ali-Hack, has recommended that a coroner’s inquest will be held into the child’s death – a decision that the mother welcomes and believes is her last hope to find closure.
But the mother claims that no official has reached out to her family notifying them of the development and that she only saw the information circulating in the media. “There was no formal notification. I just saw it in the media. I was not officially informed; I only saw it online. So, I don’t know what the next step is. I think having it televised would be the best thing because the world stood and watched and saw everything.

So, I think it should be done live; let everybody see, because there are so many unanswered questions and so many wrongs that took place there, and the police force protected the wrongdoing rather than assisting in finding my child. “ Recalling the tragedy of the scene, she further alleged concerns about the police response at the scene.
“And then the police that came there, they didn’t come to help us look for a missing child. They came to protect a business that was operating while a child was missing.” The grieving mother maintains that she is still seeking closure and justice for her daughter.
A detailed forensic autopsy, which included a CT scan and X-ray, conducted by three international pathologists, determined Adrianna’s cause of death to be drowning. However, the team of forensic experts could not determine where the drowning occurred, nor was it possible to establish the exact time of death due to the decomposition of the body.
There were initial suspicions surrounding the girl’s death after marks were observed on her body. However, the pathologists concluded during the forensic autopsy that the marks were consistent with water damage and that there was no sign of sexual assault or violence on the young girl’s body.
The nearly five-hour-long procedure was conducted last year by the Chief Medical Examiner (CME) of the State of Delaware, Dr Gary L Collins, who was selected by the Younge family, along with Barbadian experts Dr Shubhakar Karra Paul and Dr Glenn A Rudner of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, both of whom were brought in by the Guyana Government.