Balram Teekaram, 43, is currently a patient in the Intensive Care Unit of the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPHC), after three bandits broke into his Anna Catherina, West Coast Demerara home and beat and robbed him and his son early yesterday morning.
During the attack, Balram, 43, sustained two wounds to the head and. The man has since undergone a CT scan and relatives are awaiting the results. Balram, relatives said, is conscious but is not able to speak.
One of the suspected bandits was later arrested.
The three men, Yogindra Teekaram, 17, recounted, broke and entered their home shortly after 1 am yesterday. “I de feel I dreaming when I wake up. I see three young men in my room and I recognise one of them and I call out his name. I said boy [name of the man] how you going to do this to we,” he recalled. “And after that he pull a gun and point it to me and dig one slap in me.”
The man who was pointing the gun at him, Yogindra recounted, warned him to be quiet, threw a pillow at him and told him to put it over his head. At this point Yogindra said he started to beg the men not to shoot him and to take whatever they wanted from the house.
“Two of them walk out my room and I hear them moving about my father room and that is when I hear this sound…you know like when a cutlass lashing against skin…but I know they hit him…they lash him in his head while he de sleeping,” Yogindra said.
Yogindra said that the gunmen spent about 15 minutes in the house and left his father bleeding profusely from two wounds to the head. After the two men finished ransacking his father’s room and the rest of the house, he said, they summoned their third accomplice who had been watching him and escaped.
In a press statement issued last evening, police said that two of the three attackers were armed with guns. The trio, police reported, escaped with a silver chain, cell phone and an iPod. Yogindra told Stabroek News that other items, including a quantity of cash, were also stolen.
“Right now I am still confused and I don’t really know what my father had and my father still didn’t get to talk to us to tell us exactly how much money he had in his room and so,” Yogindra said.
After the gunmen left his house, Yogindra said, he climbed over the wall which separates his father’s bedroom from his own. Balram, he recalled, was tangled in his mosquito net and he immediately rushed over and freed him.
“I told daddy to be quiet and I start loosing he out…his right eye de swell up big, big, big and I couldn’t put on his spectacle and he keep telling me that he got to get it to see but I tell him to hold on me and I would take him out but it was too difficult,” Yogindra recalled.
He said that he decided to take a chance and run into a neighbour’s yard for help.
One arrested
It was a neighbour, Yogindra said, who called his relatives and police to inform them of the incident. He and his father were rushed to the Leonora Cottage Hospital for treatment and Balram was subsequently transferred to the GPHC.
Just before 2 am yesterday, the young man recalled, he and other relatives were standing outside the ICU waiting for word on his father’s condition. The matter was reported to the Leonora Police Station, Yogindra said, and police have since arrested the perpetrator who he recognised and whose name he called out during the attack.
Later that morning, he went to the police station to give police a written statement. Yogindra said that while he and other relatives were standing in the presence of police, the perpetrator came walking by the group.
“You know he come walking by as if nothing didn’t happen…it was almost as if he really didn’t believe that I had recognised him,” Yogindra said. “I immediately raised an alarm and the police arrested him.”
The other attackers were still on the run up to press time. However, Yogindra said that police had assured him and relatives that they were doing everything they could to find the other perpetrators. “I still can’t believe that someone I know come into my house and do this…and when they come out my father room they come back and tell me how they shoot him…it was really horrible,” Yogindra said.
Balram’s older son, Ravin Teekaram, told Stabroek News that he lived with his grandmother at Anna Catherina, Public Road. The man said that when he learnt of what had happened to his father, he rushed to the house which is near the seawall. “I de done prepared. I didn’t care if there was still bandits in the house. My father was in there and I was going in to get him,” Ravin said.
When he burst into the house, Ravin said he found his father in the hall. The entire place was ransacked, he recalled, and there was blood everywhere. Balram, he recounted, had a wound about 3 inches in length above the right eye and it was heavily swollen. Ravin said they were later informed by doctors that there was a second wound to the side of his father’s head.
Balram, according to him, was being treated by three doctors yesterday; an eye specialist, a bone specialist and a third who was checking him for any damage to the brain. The man said that Balram is conscious but had been unable to speak. “If you ask him to move a particular hand or foot to tell you that he is hearing you and that he has his sense then he moves it but he hasn’t been speaking,” the man explained.
