Wife of GWI worker fatally stabbed at Vreed-en-Hoop pleads for killer to be found

Just days after Police issued a wanted bulletin for a Venezuelan national accused of fatally stabbing 30-year-old Guyana Water Inc (GWI) employee Toralpher Simon Harry during an altercation at Vreed-en-Hoop, West Coast Demerara, his common-law wife is now pleading for justice.
“Investigators said Harry and a friend were returning home after attending the Car and Bike Show at the Leonora National Stadium last Sunday when they stopped at a hotdog stall along the Vreed-en-Hoop Public Road. There, Police said, an argument erupted between Harry and a 40-year-old Venezuelan national, Johnathan Mahadeo. The confrontation escalated into a scuffle. Mahadeo, reportedly armed with a knife, stabbed Harry on the left side of his neck.
Harry collapsed and was rushed to the West Demerara Regional Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. The suspect allegedly boarded a minibus and escaped. Detectives confirmed Harry sustained one stab wound.
Police have since launched a manhunt and issued a wanted bulletin on August 26.
Mahadeo’s last known address is Lot 51 New Road, Vreed-en-Hoop. Police are urging anyone with information to contact 227-1147, 225-8196, 333-3876, 911, or the nearest station.

No news, no answers
While the Police continue their investigation, Harry’s partner, Rehana Jaisingh, said she has been left with no answers. Speaking with this publication on Saturday, she said she has not been contacted since the day of his death. “Nobody’s calling me and giving me any update, nothing,” she said. “I’m just holding my head and hoping I get a call that they find this man.”
Jasingh recalled how she first learnt of the incident: two men came to her home that night, a neighbour and a friend of Harry’s. She claimed that they told her to go to the hospital but offered no explanation. “I asked them ‘What really happened?’. Nobody is talking to me,” she said.
At the hospital, she said she found one of Harry’s friends in tears before rushing to her partner’s side. Nurses were trying to stem the bleeding. “When I removed the nurse’s hand trying to stop the blood, [that’s] when I saw the hole in his neck. He was stabbed in the vein, his main vein,” she recalled. “When I saw, I fell down, and I screamed as hard as I could. I kept asking his friend, ‘How could you allow this to happen to Harry?’ He has family; he has children.”
The woman said that the family later learnt from Harry’s friend that the confrontation began while Harry was waiting for food. According to Jaisingh, her partner was standing at the hotdog stall when “a man was looking at [him] funny.” Words were exchanged, and the man allegedly drew a knife initially on her husband’s friend and later turned and threatened her husband, saying, “You want to fix you too?”
Jaisingh said she later saw a video of what unfolded. She claimed that it showed Harry walking across the road with the man following behind him. “Nobody didn’t shout at him… nobody didn’t alert him,” she said. In the clip, Harry tried “to kick away”, but then fell. “That is when he get stabbed in the neck,” she explained. He fell against a car belonging to a former teacher, then ran across the road before collapsing. Relatives later noticed a boot print in the mud at the spot where he had fallen.

Family shattered
The mother of two said the killing has shattered her family. She said Harry was the household’s sole breadwinner. “We have been together nine years, and he works, he provides; he buys groceries. “I don’t have anybody else who gives me something,” she said. She described herself as a “10-day worker” and said she will now apply for public assistance to support their children because she cannot afford to take care of them on her own.
The couple’s daughters, ages five and three, are struggling to understand the loss. “The older child is crying a lot,” Jaisingh said. “I’m trying to talk to her and tell her that… he might [be] gone, but he’s inside your heart.”
Jaisingh remembered Harry as a man who avoided conflict. “He wasn’t a public person… he was always peaceful,” she said. “If people said something [about him], he ain’t have time with them.”
She said he had been saving toward buying a car to help take the children to school and that she had seen the papers and a quotation he had gathered.
“Now everything is gone; we had plans and things that we were working on, and someone just came and took that away,” she said.
As she grieves, Jaisingh said she has been paying attention to other families’ experiences with the justice system.

Migrant crime
Within the past three years, Guyana has seen a troubling rise in violent incidents involving foreign nationals, including Venezuelan migrants, fuelling public concern over escalating crime and challenges in law enforcement response.
In August 2024, a 33-year-old Guyanese man, Ken Sukhdeo of Mocha, East Bank Demerara, was fatally stabbed during a robbery by two Venezuelan teenagers, one of whom also wounded his Venezuelan girlfriend in the assault.
That same year in November, four Venezuelan men were arrested after allegedly stabbing and assaulting a plain-clothes Policeman who had intervened in a dispute involving a Spanish-speaking woman on Cornhill Street in Georgetown.
In another tragic case the following year, a 25-year-old Venezuelan woman, Yuni Zamora Castro, was murdered in a domestic dispute in Kitty, a case investigators attributed to a jealous partner.
It’s not only Venezuelans. Earlier this year, Guyanese authorities sought INTERPOL’s help with a Red Notice for Brazilian national Fernando Teles Pereira, wanted for the murder of 21-year-old Venezuelan national Miguelys Centeno Gerdez in Timehri, East Bank Demerara.
Pereira reportedly fled Guyana after the February 5 killing, and the Red Notice – issued in August – aims to facilitate his arrest and extradition.
In addition, a Cuban national is now in custody after killing his stepdaughter and critically injuring his common-law wife at their Pike Street, Georgetown, apartment in May 2025.