…says finally finished with him
After Sandra Parks asked her live-in boyfriend to use the indoor toilet he became enraged, began beating her with a piece of wood and then almost severed her right foot with a cutlass.
At 34, Parks is an independent woman who owns a house in Roxanne Burnham Gardens, Georgetown. She earns her income from operating a small shop and has been putting food on the table for the last two years she’s spent with her abusive boyfriend.
Parks was rushed to the Georgetown Public Hospital on Tuesday morning after the man chopped her on the right ankle. The cutlass sliced through Parks’ major blood vessel then snapped the bone at her ankle.
The woman’s right leg was cast from toe to upper thigh when Stabroek News visited her in the Female Surgical Ward yesterday afternoon.
“The police have taken a statement from my daughter (Parks),” Veronica Parks said, “and they have him (Parks’ attacker) in custody.”
Sandra Parks’ left eye was blackened and her right eye swollen. When she moved her night gown aside dark bruises could be seen along her back and on her hip down to her exposed left leg. She looked battered and in pain.
She met her attacker more than two years ago. At the time the man had just been evicted from his home. Since then Parks has thrown him out of her house several times and has repeatedly forgiven him after an apology and promise to change. It wasn’t until she’d endured her first beating that Parks learnt her boyfriend had abused the now dead mother of his children.
“When I first meet him,” Parks recalled, “it was as though he had a veil over him.”
Parks said that in the beginning she’d told her attacker about her fear of ending up with a man like the one he turned out to be.
“I told him about the things I didn’t want in a man and he told me that he was a different type,” Parks said.
Last year, Parks told Stabroek News, she’d put the man out of her house. However, he came back at Christmas and promised to change. Things, she said, got worse since then.
Monday evening, Parks said, she’d cooked and the man came into the house took the food and threw it out the window.
“He told me,” she remembered, “that ‘When I beating y’all I don’t eat from y’all…I does just want beat y’all all de time’ and after he said that he terrorize me for the rest of the night [Monday].”
On Tuesday morning, Parks said, things had cooled down some. The man, she reported, went downstairs to relieve himself.
“I got a flush toilet in the house,” the woman said, “but he does still go down in the yard and [defecate] in a plastic bag and throw it away…he don’t want to use the inside toilet because he don’t want to fetch water to flush it….”
It was after she asked the man to use the indoor toilet that he attacked her, Parks said. He began beating her in the house, dragged her down the stairs, into the yard and continued the beating with a piece of wood then a cutlass.
“After he start beating me so bad I run out on the road and try to get away from him,” Parks related, “but he come behind me on the road and he beat me on the road…nobody came to stop him or assist me.”
Parks managed to reach her mother’s yard a short distance away.
“I couldn’t manage to run with the foot. I was so confused and so concerned with getting away from him I didn’t realize that my foot was hanging apart,” Parks said.
Veronica Parks told Stabroek News that she’d decided to stay out of her daughter’s personal life because Sandra Parks always took her abuser back.
“He would beat her and got her on the road outside her own house,” Veronica Parks said, “and still my daughter would take him back but yesterday (Tuesday] I decided that enough was enough after he threatened to end my daughter’s life.”
Veronica said that she told the man to stay out of her yard and leave her daughter alone.
Despite this warning the man continued to pelt Sandra Parks with various items.
“He told my daughter that he wouldn’t leave her alone until he had killed her,” Veronica said.
Sandra Parks insisted yesterday that she’s finally had enough as well.
“I will not beg the police to leave him alone this time like I have done in the past,” she stated. “This time I will go to court and I will make sure he is put in jail where he belongs.”
