The agony of a West Coast Berbice mother continues and she is desperately seeking justice for the death of her two-year-old son who was forgotten in the backseat of a locked car on October 25 last.
In an emotional interview with Stabroek News recently, Corletta Mingo-Wilson called ‘Teacher Peps’ of El Dorado Village lamented that unless justice is served she would not be able to find “closure… I don’t want this to be an unsolved mystery.”
Mayfield Babb-Fraser, 55, who had forgotten Wilson’s son in her AT 212 Toyota Carina car, PLL 3761, for over three hours had been arrested and later released on $50,000 station bail. A post-mortem examination proved that Radain Wilson died of sunstroke.
Wilson, a teacher at Belladrum Primary School said, “I am not getting it easy… I spend sleepless nights… I crying for my son” and it hurts her even more, she said, that the woman concerned is driving around and moving on with her life and has not been charged.
As if her pain were not enough, Wilson said, she has to deal with cruel comments from persons in the community who claim, “I want the woman’s money. … money cannot buy back my son’s life.”
The residents are also speculating that “they are not hearing anything about the case because I collected $3 million to settle the matter. I want people to know that nothing like that happened.”
Shortly after the incident, investigators from the Fort Wellington Police Station (FWPS) had sent the file to the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) for advice. They had also planned to contact her when they received the file.
A senior police officer had also told this newspaper a few days later that a coroner’s inquest had been ordered into the child’s death.
After one month had elapsed with no word from the police, Wilson said, she decided to visit the station to enquire. She was told that the file was still with the DPP. After two weeks she went to the court to enquire and was told that “nothing was there.”
Some two months later, Wilson sent her father to meet Commander of ‘B’ Division, Stephen Merai. He called the FWPS and ranks informed him that the DPP had sent a report. The commander instructed her father to let her return to the FWPS where the officers would read the report to her. According to the report, “no charges would be laid until an inquest is done.”
She said the police told her “they would send the jacket over to the court as early as possible to get things going.”
She is disappointed that she is still not hearing from them and feels that they are deliberately “dragging their feet… and I am not getting any justice.” She pleaded with them to “speed up the investigations.”
The distraught mother is also “asking that the government or the president look into the matter because it is not easy… who feels it knows it. Any mother who lost a child can know what I am going through. I am so hurt I am tearing up inside.”
She said her son’s death has also affected her family, pointing out that her 20-year-old son Conroy who is in army hardly comes home and her eight-year-old son Careem is still grieving.
Wilson related that she does not mind if the woman “goes free; I just want the police to do something and I would get satisfaction. They just cannot drop the matter like this. I know if you get over from man, you cannot get over from God.”
She recalled with tears that she “used to drop her [the woman’s] granddaughter to school every day… and one day I asked her to drop my child and she forgot him. I went to see her and asked her what went wrong and she kept saying she did not remember the child.”
Meanwhile, Radain had left home at around 8 am with his mother and got a ride in the car. She arrived at her school first and reminded the woman, whom she knew very well, to drop her son at his school in the next village. Babb-Fraser, a former headmistress who is engaged in a voluntary counselling and testing programme apparently forgot all about the child and passed his school.
She drove to the Rosignol Health Centre, parked in the compound and closed up the car, still without realizing that the child was in the backseat.
Around 9:30 am, a parent missed the child at the playschool and went over to the mother’s school to inform her that he was not there. Wilson immediately became concerned and since she did not have the woman’s number she went the Fort Wellington Hospital where she worked as well.
After the woman learnt that she was at Rosignol she asked the hospital officials to call there and asked, “Teacher May, where you left Danie?” She said the woman responded, “Danie?” And the telephone went dead. It was already 11 am.
Not sure what was happening, Wilson got on a bus and headed to Rosignol where her worst fears were confirmed.
