Sheema Mangar’s mother had her hopes for a breakthrough in the investigation into her daughter’s death crushed when during a scheduled meeting on Tuesday with police officials she was told that tests on fabric found underneath a suspect car would be completed in January.
Mangar succumbed to injuries in September hours after she was hit and dragged by a car as she tried to stop one of the occupants who had seconds before snatched her cellular phone.
A distraught Radica Thakoor told Stabroek News that Police Commissioner Henry Greene’s secretary contacted her last week and scheduled a meeting for Tuesday at Police Headquarters, Eve Leary. She said when she received the call she believed that there was some “good news or some new development” in the case.
To her shock, she and her husband were told that the results would not be ready until January.
“This thing left me so disappointed. This is so sick, is like if I am a victim of injustice in this country. A lil test teking so long and I just can’t understand why,” Thakoor said.
She said when she asked why she had to wait until January, she was told that “‘a test like this takes long’. But I don’t think so. It’s a simple something just matching”.
The woman said Crime Chief Seelall Persaud and another officer whose name she could not clearly remember were also at the meeting.
Efforts to contact Persaud yesterday for comment on Thakoor’s concerns were futile.
Thakoor said Greene told them the material was at a lab in Barbados but yesterday she said she had doubts about whether the samples have indeed left Guyana. Explaining her suspicions, she said that at first she was told that the material had been sent to Trinidad, but then several weeks ago she was contacted and asked to take some of her daughter’s working clothes to Eve Leary. Thakoor said she had already handed over some of her daughter’s clothing to the police shortly after Mangar died.
“Greene said it gone to Barbados and now I don’t know if it is really there. How can one test take so long? They call for a meeting to tell me they working hard and there is nothing. All ah hearing is promises and no action,” she lamented.
Thakoor recalled that when she handed over two uniforms and two working jackets to a Criminal Investigation Department (CID) rank she had enquired about the first uniform she had given the police and was told that it was still at the Brickdam Police Station.
Thakoor questioned why she had to take more clothing to the police when the first set was at another police station. She opined that something might have happened to the first set.
She recalled too that after handing over the second set of clothing, she and her husband had their mouths swabbed. That was the first time this was done.
Thakoor said that in her desperation to get justice she even sought an audience with Director of Public Prosecutions Shalimar Ali-Hack, who said “give her a week. This was around Tuesday last week but I haven’t heard back from her. She was supposed to call me.”
The mother said that from the inception she has been hoping and praying that something will come out of the matter. “I am not going to give up though. I get the impression that the police believe that I will give up but I wouldn’t. I intend to pursue this to the end so that my family can get justice,” she said.
Mangar, 20, was robbed of her mobile phone some time after 6 pm on September 11 as she waited for transportation on North Road close to Camp Street shortly after leaving Demerara Bank where she worked. The young woman chased the perpetrator who jumped into a car and ran her down when she tried to stop him from fleeing. She was then dragged from the intersection at Camp Street and North Road to Camp and Church streets. She died hours later at the St Joseph Mercy Hospital from a ruptured spleen, one of the many injuries she sustained.
Several days later the police held a suspect and detained his car but he was later released.
Police investigators recovered fabric under the vehicle that might have come from the clothing Mangar was wearing on the night she was killed.
