Almost two weeks after torching the home of his two younger sisters at De Kinderen, West Coast Demerara (WCD), a man is still on the run from police.
Relatives have been told that the man, Dwight Marks, 37, had returned to the interior, where he works and spends most of the time.
Around midday on August 15, he reportedly set fire to the two-bedroom wooden house where his sisters, Michelle Payne, 25, and Pamela Payne, 21, resided. The house belonged to their parents, who live overseas.
Colbert Leander, a member of the Tuschen/Uitvlugt Neighbourhood Democratic Council, had previously told Stabroek News that he saw the suspect “running on the street and I asked him if he set the fire. He told me yes, he set the effing fire.”
An older sister, who lives at Den Amstel, also on the West Coast Demerara and who requested that her name not be mentioned, told Stabroek News that her brother committed the act because “he just wicked and evil.”
She said he did not come home in a while and that from the time he did on Friday, August 12, he was smoking drugs and consuming alcohol.
She recalled that her sister, Michelle, called and told her that he was cursing loudly and threatening to burn the house down. At the time, Pamela was attending a church camp at Bartica.
Michelle, she said, tried to get him to stop but he refused and she decided to go to the Leonora Police Station to make a report.
The police advised her to get a restraining order and it was during this time that the man torched the house.
Leander had told Stabroek News too that Marks, who was drinking beer and cursing, approached him and said he would burn the house down. “I told him don’t do that and that I would call his eldest sister from Den Amstel and let her know,” the councillor related.
He was still speaking to the sister on the phone from the veranda when he “looked up and saw the big fire.”
The sister said she received a call earlier from Leander and she tried desperately to call the home number to speak to her brother to “calm him down” but couldn’t get through. She even sent Leander to tell Marks to check “if the phone wire was plugged in properly.”
The woman recalled that whenever he came out of the interior, her brother would always have problems with money because he would apparently spend whatever he works for, to purchase alcohol and drugs.
She said too that he would steal his sisters’ belongings and sell them at cheap prices to get money to go back. She is pleading with the police to capture him quickly so as to prevent him from doing more damage or harming anyone.
