(Trinidad Express) Police have launched a search for a man who at gunpoint yesterday kidnapped a 21-year-old mother in the presence of two children—Iyoka, five, and Sapphire Williams, three—at their First Trace, Maingot Road, Tunapuna, home.
The victim has been identified as Christine Williams and is said to be injured after being dragged barefoot, miles into a forest, where she is being kept against her will by the suspect who is a close relative.
Up to late yesterday, a contingent of police officers from the Northern Division Task Force, CID, the Anti-Kidnapping Squad, Criminal Intelligence Unit (CIU) and Police Canine Unit, were combing the forest off St John’s Road.
Beulah John, Williams’ mother, made a tearful plea for the safe release of her daughter.
She said the suspect had been harassing and intimidating her daughter with a firearm.
Williams, John said, also had several restraining orders against the suspect who defied each order of the court. John, a mother of three girls and two boys, spoke with the Sunday Express outside her home.
John was sitting on a piece of concrete with her grandchildren, outside her home which is on a hill, looking at police operations in the distance as the search for her daughter intensified.
She said at the time of the incident, she was at a job site when she received a call from a relative who told her the suspect had entered her home and dragged Williams out at gunpoint.
John said, “I left immediately and came up and when I did that I saw my grandchildren in the road. Up to now I haven’t seen my child so I praying to God that he don’t harm my child and do nothing to her because we hear he have a gun. This is not the first time because he has been tormenting her life right through but he had eased up after the men in the area beat him.”
“All them boys up here afraid of him because he was up the hill with the gun and they can’t do him nothing because he have this gun. They afraid and they had to let him walk and go with my child, but if he didn’t have the gun they might have tried to intervene. So I don’t know which part in the bush or in the mountain he is with my child but I praying to God that I get back my child safe because she has her two children to take care of,” John said.
Residents in the area also told the Sunday Express that they were fed up of the suspect tormenting their lives. They accused the man of chasing residents and threatening them with a gun. They said he had served a jail sentence for shooting a police officer in the leg in the area several years ago.
Yesterday’s incident occurred shortly after 9 a.m. while Williams was at her one-bedroom home with her daughters.
After a report was made to the police, Northern Division Task Force and CID officers responded and went in search of the suspect and victim.
Police said while passing a river in the forest, they were told by bathers that they saw the suspect with a gun ordering Williams to walk.
Officers said for several hours they conducted extensive searches in the forest, including at an abandoned coffee house where the suspect is known to hide out, but there was no sign of him or Williams.
Snr Supt David Abraham, ASP Nazrool Hosein, Cpl Bernard and PC Pereira of the Tunapuna CID were among the officers who visited the scene.