Seven months after a five-year-old girl of Canje, Berbice was removed from her home and brutally raped no one has been charged and the victim is still afraid of the dark, especially when she is left alone.
Apart from the fear, she is a lively child and appears to be coping well, her young parents who are hoping for her perpetrator(s) to be brought to justice, told Stabroek News. Around 11 pm on December 23 last year, the girl was snatched from her home with her blanket as she slept on a mattress on the floor. She was later found raped.
A number of persons, including close relatives of the girl, were taken into custody but were released without charge. The parents were told that the police needed time to conduct their investigations and that the file was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
A maternal aunt had told Stabroek News that it appeared as though the perpetrator acted with an accomplice, who served as a lookout since the child’s modest home only has one stairway at the front. The woman had opined that the perpetrator “…carried her through the trail at the back, before taking her into the bushes and raping her.” Pointing to a waterway in the area, she had also said, “You notice how the grass trampled here? This is where they walked with the girl.”
The child was rushed to the New Amsterdam Hospital where she underwent emergency surgery before being admitted to the Intensive Care Unit. During her stay at the hospital she became afraid when two male members of a humanitarian organization went to make donations to her. She dashed behind the bed and hid there, refusing to come out until they left.
Sleepwalk
After the child was discovered missing, her mother called the police and they questioned whether she would sleepwalk. The woman responded that she had never done that before but it could be possible.
The police then told her that if the child did not return that night they could report her missing the following day. But the mother could not wait that long and with the help of neighbours, she launched a frantic search.
In the dark, still night, the mother kept calling her child’s name until she heard her faint voice among the bushes from where she was found in a standing position.
She thought the girl had “run and fall down in the mud” and was not the least bit suspicious that “somebody would come and fetch she out she bed,” let alone violate her. “The police put sleepwalk to me so I keep thinking she did that.”
Clutching her blanket, the girl had related that “jumbie-man bring out me and jumbie-man pushed me down… she din say anything else”, her mother said.
As her mother was taking her home the child kept saying “ouch, ouch and that I pulling she too much.”
Her mother recalled that she took the child to the pipe in the yard and cleaned her up and everyone left thinking she was fine.
But afterwards she told her she wanted to urinate and it was at that stage she started “passing blood and I realized she get rape… and I called back everybody.”
By then residents from the other street called to say “somebody daughter get rape in the bush… One time they [persons living close to where the incident occurred] said they hear but then later they said they didn’t hear anything.”
When this newspaper visited, the child now six, appeared quite jovial. She, along with her siblings came out of the house with their parents.
When they were told to go back inside the child was at first reluctant to do so; she realized that the interview was about her.
She sat at the corner of the door and peered through the creases of the walls while her mother spoke to this reporter. Her siblings had gone across to their grandmother’s house.
Recounting the events leading up to the child’s ordeal, the mother said she had gone across to a nearby relative’s home.
Phone call
She was waiting on a phone call from her husband who was working in Trinidad at the time. She said she waited a while for the call and went over on two occasions to check on the girl and her brother who were sound asleep.
The second time she took mangoes with her to grate while waiting. She eventually decided to go home without the phone call.
During the commotion when they found the child, her husband finally called and when he heard that she had been missing he started to cry.
It was after the call that her mother knew she was raped.
