The occupants of the house where the brutal attack on Nigel Lowe began are among those in police custody even as the man’s relatives continue to seek answers as to why he was beaten and chopped to death before being tied to a utility post in ‘B’ Field, Sophia.
Contacted yesterday, Crime Chief Seelall Persaud said that three persons – one man and two women – were arrested on Wednesday afternoon, hours after the man’s body was discovered. While he said they were being treated more like witnesses than suspects, the crime chief added that they were giving conflicting accounts of what transpired.
Stabroek News has since learnt from Lowe’s mother, Jenny Lowe, that the man and one of the women held are her tenants. They are renting a property she owns in ‘A’ Field, Sophia.
Persaud said there is evidence that about 30 persons attacked the man but the reason for this is yet to be made clear. He said Lowe had previously been charged with burglary. “Right now we are looking at motivation, what motivated them [the 30 people],” he said adding that they are also investigating why the man was taken from ‘A’ Field to ‘B’ Field.
He said the intent of the 30 persons may not have been to kill Lowe but rather to recover items he may have stolen.
Police had said in a press release that the man’s “nude body was found tied to a utility pole at ‘B’ Field, Sophia, at about 06:00 hours”.
The body, according to the release, bore marks of violence “that appear to be chop wounds”. The body is at the Lyken’s Funeral Home awaiting a post-mortem examination.
Based on what this newspaper was told there was a recent spate of robberies in ‘A’ Field Sophia. It was alleged that earlier Wednesday morning residents had caught 40-year-old Lowe and two “armed” men breaking into a house and raised an alarm. The two men managed to escape but Lowe was cornered in an outdoor latrine in a nearby yard.
The man attempted to escape the residents who by then had surrounded him and were beating him with cutlasses and sticks. He ended up in a house in the yard where the pit latrine is located and was followed by the residents who continued the assault. The man was then taken to ‘B’ Field Sophia where the beating continued. This newspaper had been told that around 2 am, Lowe’s lifeless body was tied to a utility pool and then covered with pieces of wood. The residents had apparently intended to burn the body but for some reason decided not to.
When Stabroek News visited Sophia yesterday, persons were still discussing the incident with some expressing shock that Lowe who did odd jobs around the community had been killed in such a manner.
‘Chopped up
like meat’
Stabroek News spoke to Jenny Lowe at her Block ‘A’, Joe Singh Entrance, Sophia home sometime after she had viewed the remains of her son. The woman said the police visited her home and took her to the Lyken’s Funeral Home to identify the body. “If you see he. All eye din still open. He head look like when you chopping up meat,” the woman said explaining that there were several chops at the front of his head. She said that when viewing the body she noticed that something was strapped around his hand. His legs, she said, looked like they were broken and there were lacerations on his knees and hands.
“…He is not a dog. Not even a dog you should do something like that to,” she said, calling the perpetrators “beasts and terrible people”.
Jenny said that when she visited the police station she saw her tenants but they told her a different story. The woman related that she had rented the property to a woman whose husband works in the “bush” and would sometimes be there. She said there was a one-year lease agreement between them and the woman was to have gone to her on Wednesday to renew the agreement since the year had finished.
According to Jenny, the woman related that she and her husband were sitting outside their home when “people circle the man from the back”. She said her tenant told her not to worry with “what people saying and that her husband should not take the blame for what happened”.
Jenny told Stabroek News that neither the woman nor her husband knew that Lowe was her son. She said the woman related to her that “they heard a noise and her husband told her to go inside”, but she did not comply.
At that time, she said, Lowe was in the “toilet” and she firmly believes that he was going to use it. She said that based on what the woman said after the crowd converged on the toilet he ended up in front of the door, which was just pushed in. She said it was related to her that when her son braced on the door it opened and he ran inside the house. The woman told her that “everybody run in behind he”.
According to Jenny, “they beat he there and then they bring he out and drag he out from ‘A’ Field and take him to ‘B’ Field”. She said that the woman strongly denied that her husband was involved in the beating, although she was given a different version by persons in the area.
Jenny said while she was at the police station she enquired from the ranks what crimes her son had committed and they were unable to provide her with an answer. “Police said he ain’t do nothing… I could not believe it when I saw his body this morning,” she lamented.
Tried to help him
Jenny said that Lowe, the second of four children she had given birth to, became wayward in his teenage years and she had tried desperately to help him but to no avail.
She recalled that after writing Common Entrance, as it was called then, Lowe was awarded a place at the North Georgetown Secondary School. She said her boy was very bright and was good in Mathematics. According to Jenny, Lowe dropped out of school and she went to the Probation Department for help. “I tried to get him back [into school] but it didn’t work,” she said adding that later his father managed to get him a job at the then Guyana Electricity Corporation as a labourer. The woman said that by age 21, Lowe had worked his way up to a supervisory position.
She said she later learned that her son had started “smoking” drugs at age 14. She also learnt that he had been “getting away” from school to engage in this habit with friends in isolated areas such as the ‘blacka’.
The woman said that in an effort to help she tried to get him into the Salvation Army drug rehabilitation programme, to no avail as Lowe would get away. She said that at one point, she took him to church every night, but that also did not work.
She said that following his death she learned that her son had been making blocks on and off for the last six years at a location on Mandela Avenue. She said her son’s employer was at the police station when she went there yesterday.
The woman said that because of her son’s habit, he developed mental problems and he occasionally slept in a dilapidated structure which had no windows and missing walls, at the back of her house. If not there, she said, he would sleep in a cardboard box in her yard, on the Regent Street pavement, or in Le Repentir Cemetery. Based on what she told this newspaper, days would pass without her seeing him.
“My son [was] not a criminal. He [didn’t] have a criminal mind,” she stressed noting that he liked to clean out the coconut trees at the back of the yard. She added that he would sell the coconuts to “buy whatever he had to buy”.
Assistance
Jenny who described herself as a pensioner said she was in desperate need of assistance to bury her son since she has no money. She indicated that Lowe had three children two of whom are abroad and studying – one to become a lawyer and the other an electrician.
She said that less than one year ago she buried Lowe’s father Renwick Fordyce with whom she had lived for 43 years. The woman explained that when Lowe was born, Fordyce was working in the interior. Fordyce died on July 22, 2012 from kidney failure.
Jenny said she was first married at the age of 17, but her then husband migrated to London where he was subsequently murdered.
The woman said she depended heavily on the rent she received from the property in ‘A’ Field, Sophia, which she and Fordyce had built for their daughter. She said she and the tenants were also supposed to discuss an increase in the rent as she had started to do some work on the property and was planning to do other renovations.
Anyone willing to assist Jenny with the funeral expenses can make contact with her on 219-3148 or 618-4526.
