By Shabna Ullah
A post-mortem examination conducted on the remains of the 18-year-old waitress, suspected to have been gang raped in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, revealed that she died from drowning.
Cane harvesters found Deokali Peter around 5.30 am on Tuesday lying naked on the roadside obliquely opposite Dust Till Dawn, a bar at Port Mourant – where she had been seen drinking the night before. She was groaning in pain.
Her mother, Kamaldai Bennie, told Stabroek News yesterday that her daughter’s body bore scratches on her neck and forehead and that there were “black and blue marks on her right side.” She said the doctor also related to her that as well as raping her, it appeared that the attackers had pushed her down in a nearby trench.
Cane harvesters found her and one of them gave her his shirt to cover herself and took her to nearby residents who assisted with a pair of pants.
The teen, who was employed at the Santa Rosa bar on the Corentyne, appeared to be dead around 8 am. She was covered with mud and her clothes which police later found nearby were also muddy.
Police sources told Stabroek News that Peter, who hailed from Skeldon, left home two years ago and had no fixed place of abode. She had been staying at the home of a female friend at Hampshire Squatting Area for the past month.
Bennie told this newspaper that she last saw her daughter on Saturday when she visited her in the company of a young man who was driving a car.
The woman, a vegetables vendor at the Skeldon Market said her daughter told her she was involved in a relationship with the man and was staying at his house.
According to Bennie, the two stopped at the market to see her around 2 am and promised to return to visit her at her home in the afternoon and they did.
The third of five siblings, Peter visited her mother “every two weeks” and would take money and presents for her and her younger siblings.
She had dropped out of school at age 12 and started selling with her mother in the market.
Bennie told this newspaper that her daughter got married at the age of 16.
Three months later, the marriage ended and the teen, whose father died ten years ago, started “following bad company and started to walk late at nights…,” the mother said.
She said she had always encouraged her daughter to return home and she kept promising that she would.
Bennie said that on Sunday night, “a boy called me on my cell phone and fooled me that my daughter was dead and I thought it was true. But Tina grabbed the phone from he and tell me ‘no mommy ah dey right here’.”
Because of this prank, however, when someone rang her just after 8 am on Tuesday to tell her that Peter was dead she did not believe and told him to “check again”.
It was only after the man called her a second time and told her that he saw the body that she hustled to the scene. However, by then her daughter’s body had already been taken to the Port Mourant Hospital mortuary. Bennie related that when she saw the remains of her daughter she screamed and fainted.
She said that yesterday she gave police the telephone number from which the call had been made on Sunday, but when they contacted him, the young man denied that he had pulled the prank.
One of the teen’s acquaintances, who works at the Embassy Club bar, had told this newspaper that she was drinking at Dust Till Dawn with two male friends when she saw Peter enter with a group of young men around 11 pm.
She said Peter, who appeared to be intoxicated, asked for a cigarette then continued drinking at the bar with the men. The friend said she later left to go home and did not hear anything about Peter after that.
According to police reports, the waitresses at Dust Till Dawn said that after the bar closed at 1 am and they were leaving to go home, they saw Peter sitting alone at the side of the road.
In addition, the mother of the friend with whom she stayed, related that the teen had been out drinking earlier and had returned home already “tight” (intoxicated).
The friend’s mother said Peter told her she was “going out on the road again and ah tell she don’t go because she de tell me her stomach hurting she.” The woman said Peter insisted on going out and she was shocked to receive the news of her demise on Tuesday morning.
Peter will be laid to rest today, following a funeral according to Hindu rites at her grandmother’s house at Skeldon.
