A woman and her 13-year-old son were held at gunpoint and robbed on Tuesday night minutes after arriving from the Cheddi Jagan International Airport (CJIA).
Rowena Bowen, a Travel Agent, of Lot 2 Shell Road, Kitty, had landed from Miami at the CJIA airport around 10.30 pm on Tuesday when she noticed a suspicious man standing and looking at her at the arrival terminal.
“On the way down from the airport I just had this feeling that maybe somebody was following. I kept looking back constantly and saw a car following us all the way down from the airport,” she told Stabroek News yesterday. She said that she constantly kept her eyes pasted in the rear view mirror and noticed that the car kept following them. She explained that while every other car would drive pass them and go in different directions, this one specific car, which she had noticed next to the car that had picked her up at the airport, kept driving slowly behind them.
“At one time coming off the back road I said let me see if the car is really following us but it didn’t turn exactly and started to drive slowly. After a while I noticed it behind us again all the way on Sheriff Street, into Campbell Avenue, into Middleton Street and into Barr Street, where I finally lost sight of it,” she said.
Bowen said that when they arrived at her Shell Road home she told the driver that she thought someone was following and that they should not stop and continue going somewhere else. The driver said he didn’t notice any vehicle and so she exited the car and was walking up the stairs to her front door when she noticed two young men walking in the street.
“At that point while I was going up the stairs something tell me to throw my passports away so I threw them in the plant pot beside the stairs,” she said.
She recounted that the two men walked pass the house and so she subsequently picked up the passports from the plant pot. After they turned back and started walking towards the house again, she said, she had another gut feeling that told her to hide the passports again and she did.
“After they passed the house again one of them wave me off and continued walking and my son asked me if I knew him and I said no,” Bowen said.
She added that when the men were about 10 feet away from the house they suddenly turned back and rushed towards the driver of the car. She said one of them pulled a gun on the driver and the other rushed up the stairs and demanded her bag.
“He said that he would kill me if I don’t give him the bag and so I gave it to him and he turned around and tried to run away,” she said, but fell down the flight of stairs onto the concrete below. She said the man who took her bag was “a youth” and he was dressed in a white t-shirt and khaki pants. After he fell, she said, he quickly got up and escaped with the other man.
She said she then called the police station and police officers arrived promptly and a search ensued.
The two men escaped with about US$750, a camera, and a Samsung phone. Bowen’s nephew tracked the phone throughout the night and it was located at Vlissengen Road, Hadfield Street, and finally at Houston.
She added that while when she passed Houston there was a road block on the East Bank Highway, the police had not stopped any vehicles that matched the description of the one she gave.
She said her nephew checked the location of the phone around 2 pm yesterday and it was in Agricola.
Police have yet been able to arrest anyone in connection with the robbery.
