By Jeff Trotman
A farmer died on Thursday, hours after he was struck to the head during a row at Moblissa along the Soesdyke/Linden Highway.
Davanand Daniels, 37, of Moblissa was hit on the head by a friend, identified only as “Victor,” and his widow, Lynette, yesterday said that he might have lived if he had been rushed to a hospital immediately after the assault.
However, the woman said her now deceased husband was left lying in a pool of his own blood for hours after the assault, which occurred in a shop in the community. He later succumbed at the Linden Hospital. The suspect fled when police were called about the assault but later turned himself in at the Amelia’s Ward Police Outpost.
According to a police press release, Daniels and another man were involved in an argument at Moblissa on Thursday afternoon, during which he was hit to his head with a piece of wood. The murder weapon was later identified as a two by four piece of greenheart wood.
At Moblissa, Lynette struggled to hold back tears as she spoke of her husband, with whom she had been living together for seven years.
The 51-year-old mother of four, who hails from Canal Number One, West Bank Demerara, also disclosed that she had been living at Moblissa for five months, where she and her husband earned their livelihood from farming.
Lynette said the assault on her husband occurred around midday but she only learned of it around 4:30pm, when she visited the shop.
She found her husband still lying on the concrete floor in a pool of blood bleeding profusely while the shopkeeper, Mike, was, indifferently lying in a long wooden bench about fifteen feet away.
“Me ain’t know wuh deh quarrel fo’,” she said, “and the shop man, Mike, ain’t send a message to me or pick he up and carry he to the hospital or call a taxi. Them say he pon the ground drunk and must be relaxing. I say, ‘Not in this condition–in a pool of blood–’ and me start pon them and then they call a taxi and when the taxi do come and we putting he in the taxi, a lady say, ‘Don’t worry with the taxi, call the police.’
And when they call for the police, the taxi man say, ‘Take he out the car,’ because he don’t want worries with police,” the woman recounted.
“Me husband don’t drink every day,” Lynette said. “He does drink one and far. He does play domino at the shop and take a lil fine drink.”
Lynette said the shop functioned as a grocery, rum shop, beer garden as well as a meeting and recreational place where residents play card games and dominoes. “Mike, and all, too, for a big man, he lie down there before he call me, or get one taxi,” she bemoaned before stating that the shopkeeper said he had attempted to part the men and he received a lash on his hand.
She said when they lifted her husband out of the taxi, she sat on the Moblissa Road outside of the shop “and put he fo’ brace pon me.” She said when the police arrived from Linden, she and his stepsister accompanied him with two police officers at the back of the pickup to the Linden Hospital Complex.
According to her, Daniels had a gaping wound in the middle of his head, a hole at the side of his left eye and his left eyeball was bulging out of its socket.
She said he was breathing but his body was limp when they took him to the hospital and he died while receiving medical examination. “The doctor say if we did take him earlier, he woulda live,” she added. “But like he bleed to death.”
Stepsister of the deceased, Davina Shaunielle Williams, said she heard the two men arguing around 2pm but she did not see when her stepbrother was struck. She said she went into the shop around 4:30pm and saw him lying on the ground in a pool of blood. She said that she picked him up and “he did bleeding bad.”
“The shop owner went lying down. He didn’t doing nothing,” Williams said, adding that her stepbrother was lying on the ground for about two hours.
She said there were about four to five persons outside the shop when she went. She said her step brother was transported to the hospital around 6pm. During the journey, she said, “he did breathing but he didn’t shaking, nothing’.”
Meanwhile, Lynette said that while she was sitting on the road waiting on the police to arrive, with her husband braced to her, the suspect, Victor, sat on a truck tyre on the other side of the road. When he saw the police vehicle approaching the shop, he ran away into the bush, she added.
Victor, a logger, and her husband were friends, she explained. She said that she could not estimate Victor’s age but noted that he had five children with his wife, who delivered their last child just over a week ago.
When Lynette took reporters to the scene of the assault on Friday afternoon, the shop was closed as the shopkeeper had been detained for questioning by the police.
Noting that she was thirteen years older than her husband, Lynette said that they did not have any children together but he was the father of two–a nine-year-old daughter and an eleven-year-old son. She said her husband was “a nice, friendly guy,” who loved friends and enjoyed conversing with people. “So much years we marry, he never hit me. He never ill treat me. He never do me nothing,” she said.
