A mid-forties man died at the West Demerara Hospital after he slashed one of his wrists in a drunken rage while trying to force his way into his house to get his hands on his common-law wife on Thursday night.
Dead is Dennis Harris, 45, of Lot 1525 Onderneeming, Parfaite Harmonie, West Bank Demerara. His wife, Yonette Gumbs, 44, was taken into police custody after Harris cried out, minutes before dying, that, “Yonette and she children do this to me.”
The woman’s daughter, Sabrina Wray, told Stabroek News that her mother and her stepfather were arguing when they returned home on Thursday from a family reunion. She said Harris was drunk and also high on marijuana. “It was around ten pass eleven when they come home and he cuss her up and tell her a set of hurtful thing,” she said, recalling Harris waving scissors in her face and saying he would kill her.
“He was so drunk she pushed him out of the house and we lock the door and then he cuff the window and I see his hand and blood spill up all over. The window thick and one cuff he bruk it,” she related.
She added that he continued rowing but they did not open the door and eventually he left and went to one of his relatives in the village. He was subsequently rushed to the hospital and died an hour later.
“His family tell we that his belly gon in and when they carry him to the hospital he didn’t want them doctors touch he and he keep saying that ‘Yonette and she children do this to me.’”
She stated that policemen turned up at their house and arrested her mother. “She didn’t kill him… if her de only open that door he would have killed one of us in here,” she added.
Wray said she along with a cousin was home at the time of the incident. Harris and Gumbs were together for seven years.
