On Wednesday night, three armed men forced their way into the home of a city businessman, located near the Alberttown Police Station, terrorized his four children and escaped with approximately $5 million in cash.
Girly Persaud, mother of the children, told this newspaper yesterday that the incident occurred at about 9.15 pm. She and her husband own and operate a pharmacy in the city and had not yet returned home.
The couple’s children, ages 20, 18, 15 and 14, were together in the Lot 55 Fourth Street, Alberttown, Georgetown house. Mark, Persaud, 20, heard someone rapping at their second floor window shortly after 9 pm; the man was calling out for his father. According to Girly Persaud, it was usual for visitors to come calling on her husband at that hour because of his status as a businessman. “He [Mark] told me that when he opened the door the man who had been calling started explaining very nicely to him that he had bought some medication from our pharmacy but had a problem with it and wanted to know when his father would be home,” Persaud explained.
Mark, the woman related, advised the man to visit the pharmacy and turned around to check the time so that he could say whether the business place was still open. It was at this point, Persaud said, that the man and two others who were with him launched their attack. “My son told me that it was as he got a glimpse at the clock he felt something pressing against his chest and before he knew it he was being forced into the house by the man who now had a gun in his hand,” Persaud related.
Persaud said two of the men were armed with guns while the third had a knife.
The men, she added, had also made an effort to hide their faces but were not fully masked. After the men entered the house, they started to demand cash and jewellery from the four youths. However, they could not tell the men where their parents kept anything. “They gun butted my eldest son repeatedly to the head demanding that he give them money and after they realized that they really couldn’t tell them where the money was they put the four children to lie down on the floor and started to ransack the house,” Persaud explained.
After about 15 minutes, she said she had learnt from her traumatized children that the men gave up their frantic search and decided to make off with an X-box 360.
However, as the three men were leaving one was overheard telling the other one that they had to make one more try to get some money.
“So they returned to the house and started searching again and within a couple of minutes they found a briefcase with four to five million dollars and they escaped with that,” she noted.
Persaud said that she and her husband received a telephone call from their eldest son informing them about what had happened. Investigators, the woman said, have since visited their home and “are doing their jobs”.
When Stabroek News visited the Alberttown home yesterday afternoon, the couple’s four children were at the police station, located along the same street, giving statements.
“My youngest daughter was so traumatized that she didn’t stop crying long after the incident… I can’t imagine the horror my children had to endure and something like this isn’t something anyone forgets in a hurry,” Persaud stated.
