Days after he was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for molesting a five-year-old, Deosarran Narine is suspected to have taken his own life by ingesting a poisonous substance.
Commander of ‘C’ Division Calvin Brutus yesterday confirmed to Stabroek News that the partially decomposed body of Narine was discovered around 1 pm yesterday at an abandoned shack at Mahaicony, where he was reportedly hiding out. A bottle, suspected to have contained a poisonous substance, was also found lying next to his body.
However, Brutus explained that while the matter is being treated as a suspected suicide, an autopsy will be conducted to conclusively determine how Narine met his demise.
Sources told this newspaper that prior to his death, Narine contacted his relatives and informed them that he would rather die than spend time in prison. The circumstances surrounding Narine’s death bear some similarity to those in the case of rape accused Stonie Henry, whose death earlier this week is still being investigated. The police said Henry, 47, of Lot 539 Mocha Housing Scheme, East Bank Demerara, died at the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPH) on Tuesday morning, hours after he reportedly ingested poison at the East Ruimveldt Outpost.
The police said their investigations revealed Henry told fellow prisoners that he wanted to die. They also suggested that he had ingested a carbon tablet. It remains unclear how Henry might have obtained the poison. He had been arrested on Monday for allegedly raping a 16-year-old girl of Mocha Housing Scheme in May. An autopsy conducted on Wednesday on the body of Henry could not determine his cause of death. As a result, government pathologist Dr Nehaul Singh has ordered that tissue from several of Henry’s organs be sent for toxicology analysis.
Meanwhile, Narine, called ‘Cha Cha’ and ‘Kumar,’ was absent on Tuesday when he was given a life sentence after a jury found him guilty of child molestation at the conclusion of an in-camera trial at the Sexual Offences Court in Georgetown.
Stabroek News was informed that after the sentence was imposed, Narine moved from his Cane Grove, East Coast Demerara home in an effort to evade the police and was staying at the abandoned shack where his body was found.
Efforts to locate Narine ahead of the summation of the evidence were unsuccessful, resulting in the judge eventually taking the decision to proceed without him.
After about two hours of deliberations, the jury returned with its verdict, convicting Narine of the offence of sexual activity with the child, whose vagina he penetrated with his finger sometime between May 1st and May 31st, 2014. In imposing the sentence afterward, Justice Priya Sewnarine-Beharry noted that the court had considered both the aggravating and mitigating circumstances of the case, while pointing out the seriousness and prevalence of the offence.
The court highlighted, also, the psychological trauma the child would have experienced and with which she would now have to live for the rest of her life.
The judge had ordered that Narine spends 25 years behind bars before becoming eligible for parole.
