A 27-year-old gold miner yesterday drowned reportedly while taking a bath at Bamboo Landing, Barama River, North West District.
Dead is Floyd Mathis called `Bingo’ of President’s College Road, Golden Grove, who was scheduled to tie the knot in October.
Relatives told this newspaper that the information surrounding his death was sketchy. Barbara Sumner, his grandmother with whom he spent most of his time, explained that some time after 11 am, a friend called and informed her of the incident. She said all she was told was that Mathis had drowned.
Police at Port Kaituma have since confirmed that they have received a report about a drowning but up to late yesterday afternoon the body had not reached Port Kaituma, which is a six-hour drive from Bamboo Landing.
Sumner explained to this newspaper that Mathis left home last Saturday for the gold fields of Port Kaituma. She said this was his third trip to the interior and his first to the North West.
She said her grandson was a trained fitter machinist but was forced to abandon that career path since he was not being paid enough.
The elderly woman said that he choose Port Kaituma as he though that he would have been able to make more money there.
Sumner said she last spoke with Mathis on the night before he left home and all was well. “He was always more like a son than a grandson to me,” she said as she recalled the good times she had spent with him. She said they parted ways in “good faith” which makes the news of his death even more painful.
Stabroek News was told that Mathis was very religious and was the leader of the youth arm of the Golden Grove Seventh Day Adventist Church.
Relatives said the man’s fiancée Michelle Hamilton is inconsolable. Hamilton is a teacher at the Golden Grove Primary School.
Relatives said that based on what they were told the body was being taken to Port Kaituma but the morgue there is not functioning.
Meanwhile, residents at Port Kaituma informed this newspaper that the new refrigeration system which was installed by the regional administration late last year only worked for two weeks.
This situation has forced residents to return to the old tradition of buying buckets of ice and formalin to try to keep the body fresh until burial.
In relation to this latest case, residents said that Matthew’s Ridge was closer.
However, the residents explained that if the body was taken to Matthew’s Ridge the situation would be worse since there is no functioning morgue there.
Ice is also not as readily available in that community as it is in Port Kaituma. At Matthew’s Ridge, corpses are not kept for more than a day.
Stabroek News was told that a post-mortem examination will have to be performed on Mathis’s remains and the only way to get the body from the North West would be by plane. That might not be possible until tomorrow.
Residents called on the Region One authorities to look into the state of all morgues in the North West. “This is a cruel situation residents are living in and the region it appears is not seeing this, as nothing is being done about it,” a resident complained.
Mathis, who lost both of his parents to illness in the last few years, also leaves to mourn three younger siblings.
