A three-year-old Amerindian girl was brutally attacked and dragged from the steps of her home by a jaguar yesterday at Isseneru in Region 7.
The jaguar was shot dead by villagers who rushed to the aid of the child after she was dragged nearly 40 feet away into the bushes.
Jasmine Joseph was attacked around nine o’clock in the morning, minutes after taking a bathe in the Mazaruni River with her aunts. The cat’s claws ripped her face, head, back, torso and legs.
“We heard the screaming from till over the river and people said it wasn’t anything serious. But I was worried and I sent over the boat,” Agatha Joseph told Stabroek News yesterday at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) while doctors were fighting to save her granddaughter’s life.
Joseph related that in November Jasmine was attacked by a jaguar, but villagers had managed to scare the animal away. Jasmine had scratches on her legs following that attempt.
“When I heard the screaming, I thought it had to be that it [the jaguar] come back to bite her so I hurry and send the boat,” Joseph said, adding that her worst fears were confirmed when she saw her granddaughter’s body, mauled and bleeding. “She didn’t wake up since then,” Joseph added.
She said that her daughter had left her with the child and gone into the back dam to work. “But I went to a church service around seven and she was with her aunties in the house,” she related, adding that the child and her aunts had gone to the river landing to bathe and were returning home when the jaguar pounced from the bushes and grabbed Jasmine.
“It bust up her face, all her eyes,” she lamented, adding, “it didn’t get to bite her [in November] …so it come back straight to her again.”
Jasmine was air-dashed to the GPHC yesterday afternoon after being treated at a health centre in her village. She was undergoing surgery in the Emergency Unit at the hospital yesterday.
