Almost two years after Rupert Randolph Gill was stabbed to death in Parfait Harmonie relatives are still fighting for justice and are frustrated that police never issued a wanted bulletin for the suspect.
The relatives of the deceased have been knocking at the doors of various senior police officers in a bid to get a wanted bulletin issued for the suspect. However, their efforts have been futile.
Gill, 51, of Lot 279 Parfait Harmonie, West Bank Deme-rara was fatally stabbed by a man at ‘Four Corner’ in his neighbourhood. The attack, a relative told Stabroek News, resulted from a past feud between Gill and the suspect.
The relative, who preferred to remain unnamed, said Gill’s widow and his three children, two of whom are young adults, deserve to see his attacker behind bars. Since the beginning of the investigation, the relative said, they were not satisfied that police were making “a good enough effort”.
On May 1, 2009 at about 5.30 pm Gill, a bus driver/mechanic, was reportedly stabbed in the neck by the suspect after he intervened in a matter “concerning the burning of DVDs”. Persons who were at the scene when this newspaper visited hours after the incident said they did not know what had happened between the men.
Since then, relatives have heard various accounts of the incident. Gill’s wife, the relative said, was the first of his relations to learn of what had happened. The woman, according to the relative, was in her kitchen when a neighbour shouted to her that Gill had been stabbed at ‘Four Corner’.
She rushed out of her house but by the time she arrived at the scene, Gill had already been rushed to the West Demerara Regional Hospital. By the time Mrs Deborah Gill arrived at the medical institution all she saw was her husband’s lifeless body on a hospital bed.
“His wife has never gotten proper answers about why he was killed… She is perhaps the one who suffered the most in all of this. She had been running from policeman to policeman trying to get them to arrest this suspect but still no one seems to want to do anything,” the relative said.
In the first few weeks after Gill’s death, the relative said, police went to Mrs Gill’s home several times. As time went by the visits stopped and then the woman stopped hearing from police all together. “We know that what we are going through is nothing new… we know that there are possibly hundreds of other families in Guyana going through the same thing but in our case they [police] actually have the name of a suspect who is still in this country and they are just not making the effort,” the relative lamented.
Many weeks after Gill was murdered, the relative recounted, they were allowed to read a statement which was given to police by the reputed wife of the suspect. In the statement, the relative said, the woman said that several months before Gill’s death he and her reputed husband were involved in an argument at the minibus park.
“I remember clearly reading in that statement that the woman said that her husband told her that he and my relative had an argument on the bus park… He [the suspect] was under the influence of alcohol that day and my relative refused to let him in the bus and embarrassed him and since then the woman said that her husband said he had my relative down in his mind,” the relative said.
Several hours after Gill was killed his wife and another relative had gone with police to the Yarrow Dam, Georgetown area where the suspect was originally from. “While there I remember that the police made the woman call her husband on his cellular phone. He didn’t know that the police were there with her and he told her he was on the East Bank [Demerara] and that was it,” the relative recalled. “The police didn’t bother looking for him after that.”
Investigators, the relative noted, did make several efforts to get a picture of the suspect from his relatives. However, these efforts were made during the initial stages of the investigation and no follow-up checks were made, the relative said.
“Recently we went to GECOM hoping to get a picture of the suspect… but we were told that even they don’t have a picture of him… for almost two years we have been hearing that because police can’t find a picture of him [the suspect] that is why they are not issuing a wanted bulletin for him,” the relative explained.
Police, the relative said, never made a move to check with the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) or the Immigration Office to see whether they had the suspect on file and would be able to provide a picture of him.
“I mean we would be satisfied if they issue a bulletin for this man without a picture… we are the ones who have been searching for the picture. When you think about it is really ridiculous that the police don’t have some sort of arrangement with GECOM and Immigration to access pictures in these cases,” the relative said.
