Bandits broke and entered the Good Faith, Mahaicony home of a 58-year-old widow on Saturday night and escaped with more than $200,000 in cash and jewellery.
As the bandits fled from her house shortly after 11 pm, Savitri Goriah recalled, they discharged a gunshot at a group of men who attempted to pursue them. Goriah explained that following the death of her husband about four weeks ago she has been living in the house with her son and daughter both of whom are in their 30s.
The woman said that her husband’s brother passed away several days ago and it was from his wake she was returning when she realized that bandits had broken into her house. Her home, Goriah explained, is located just behind the “wake house”.
“Me, my son and daughter went to my brother-in-law wake,” the woman reported, “and some time around 11 o’clock I lef them and say I going home.”
Goriah said that as she was walking up her stairs she saw a strange man peep out her window. Fear, she recalled, froze her briefly but then she ran down the stairs and back towards the wake house screaming out for help. After she raised the alarm, Goriah said, a group of men from the wake house went to investigate.
However, the bandits discharged a shot at the group to scare them off and made good their escape. The bullet, according to her, left a hole in her wall and roof.
Goriah said the men stole $70, 000, US$790 and CDN$200. “They went away with some jewellery too but like up to now I didn’t think about the whole thing or check to see what missing,” Goriah said.It was later, Goriah said, she discovered that the bandits forced their way into the two-storey house by removing a section of a side louvre window. The woman said that she only saw one of the perpetrators but heard others moving around the house before she ran for help. Shortly after the gunshot was fired, Goriah said, she called the police. A team arrived at the scene some time later. An investigator returned to her house yesterday morning and said that he would return today to check the area for fingerprints.
“But I don’t know if it make sense for them to come so late to look for fingerprints because we done walk about the house and so and touch thing and so,” the woman said.
For more than 20 years, Goriah said, she has been living in the village of Good Hope and in all her years they never believed that something like that could happen to her. “I use to feel safe you know…I hearing people from other place get rob but I never think it would happen to me one day,” she said.
When she entered her house for the first time after the perpetrators had fled, she further recounted, the place had been ransacked. Goriah said that she has since straightened her home but no longer feels safe. “Imagine this is my place where I does rest my head and look how it so easy for people to barge in your place and take things that don’t belong to them…look at that eh,” the widow lamented.
