The body that was found floating in the Sussex Street canal near La Penitence Market on Saturday has been identified as 43-year-old Carl Christian called ‘Blacka’.
While no marks of violence were found on the body, the police are awaiting the results of a post-mortem examination scheduled for tomorrow to determine if foul play was involved.
Christian’s mother, Roselin said that she last saw her son last week Monday, when he visited her at her Laing Avenue home saying that he had been discharged from hospital.
She explained that he was an abuser of drugs for many years and would often fall ill.
“If any time something wrong with he, then he would turn up… He would spend one or two days then he would say that he going to the shop to get something and that would be the last time I would see him for months,” the woman told this newspaper adding that she did not know where he stayed when he was not at her home.
Roselin said that when Christian arrived at her home last Monday, he was very weak and he slept there that night. The following morning, she said, she left him some soup and went out. To her surprise, she recalled, when she returned he was gone but he left a note saying that he had gone to the hospital to collect a food hamper and would be back.
“I wouldn’t be surprise if he fell into the trench accidentally because he had no right leaving here.
He didn’t even eat the soup and he wasn’t strong. I kept waiting for him. I didn’t throw away that soup…,” Roselin said.
She recalled that a man had asked her if her son had been killed and she said that she dismissed it, thinking that he was referring to the elderly man who was found in the same canal, days earlier.
The woman added that later someone showed her son the newspaper and enquiries revealed that it was indeed him. “I am not upset with God… I am upset with him because when I first saw his condition he could hardly walk and I was surprised when I returned and he was not here,” his mother said.
Christian’s relatives said that before he turned to drugs he was a trained mason, a skill he acquired after spending two to three years in the former Guyana National Service. He was also a minibus driver and a ballroom dancer.
Christian also leaves behind two children and five siblings.