Debra Anibal of Ithaca Village, West Bank Berbice, faces a bleak Mother’s Day without her daughter, Vanessa Benjamin, who was brutally stabbed to death last month, allegedly by her children’s father.
Benjamin’s two children, aged one and three years old, Anibal says, miss their mother.
Anibal described her daughter as a loving person. Benjamin had worked as a cleaner at a nearby daycare centre as she was raising and providing for her two children on her own.
The 21-year-old woman was murdered on April 23, following an argument with her children’s father, Jamal Angus, who has since been charged and is in prison on remand pending trial. Angus also reportedly stabbed Anibal, which resulted in her being hospitalised, as well as himself.
According to the report of a post-mortem examination done by Dr Nehaul Singh at Anthony’s Funeral Parlour, Benjamin’s cause of death was “perforation of the heart and lungs due to stab wounds”. She sustained some 15 stab wounds.
Anibal has told this newspaper that she had returned home from Rosignol, West Bank Berbice around 5.25 pm on April 23, when she saw her daughter and her two grand-children also heading home.
She says her daughter had a strange look on her face and she said to her, “I don’t like how you’re looking”. Benjamin, she adds, moved to lay on a chair, placing her one-year-old daughter on her stomach. Anibal then headed to the kitchen but noticed movement in one of the bedrooms.
“I still don’t know how he get into the house, but he already had the knife and he run out and jump on Vanessa and her daughter and start stab her in her head,” she recalls.
The two minor children witnessed the entire attack. “I go in my room and get some pepper water but like I ain’t had strength to throw it because it would have caught the children too,” Anibal says.
After the man had stabbed her daughter multiple times, she says, he turned on her, rushed to her and dealt her two stabs to her head, a third to her neck and a fourth to her breast, before she was able to escape and run out of the house.
She recalls that Benjamin was not “even hollering” by then, but suddenly got up and also ran out of the house.
“She run down the stairs and into an empty lot and fall on her knee and she ain’t saying nothing, but she head just swaying back and forth,” Anibal says.
The man followed her there, she adds, and continued to stab her multiple times again. “I get blackout for two seconds and people start to run and then he start to stab himself. And when he see my sister coming, he throw himself on the ground.”
According to Anibal, the murder weapon was taken from her kitchen. “Is a white-handle knife and it had other knives there, but I didn’t have the strength in me to pick it up and stab anybody.”
‘Don’t have the strength to go back there’
On previous Mother’s Days, Anibal said, she and Benjamin would, “cook up and invite relatives and friends” over. However, Anibal, who is now residing with her sister, says she cannot return to the house where the attack happened. “She will be missed. I don’t have the strength to go back there. I done give up the house. I am just asking God for strength.”
Anibal says Benjamin’s daughter is calling for “mama”, while her three-year-old son has memory of the incident since he has brought it up with relatives.
The woman stressed that she will not give up on her grandchildren, as she plans to look after them now. She also notes that she is grateful for the support from her relatives.
Anibal is still experiencing pain and is unable to walk fully on her own. She has to return to the hospital on May 14. Benjamin was laid to rest on April 24.
Anibal says her daughter had been in a relationship for four years with an extremely possessive man. “She can’t talk with no male, even if is a cousin or nephew. If she walking to work is a problem and he don’t work, only smoke up.”
There had been a previous incident, she says, where he had been waiting to attack Benjamin with an axe. “She went and bring two police, but he run and hide underneath the bed and the police said they can’t do nothing.”
Anibal herself was a victim of domestic violence at the hands of her now ex-husband. In 2010, she recalls, “he break two vodka bottles and used that to injure me.” She was hospitalised for some time following that incident, but she says her current injuries were worse. “It more bad now though because the knife went in.”
