(Trinidad Guardian) Having been together with the father of her children for 15 years and having gone through years of severe abuse to a point where she sustained broken bones in the process, 26-year-old Vera Golabie refused help from the police to be placed in a safe house.
Golabie, a mother of two, was fatally stabbed by a male relative. The incident happened on Thursday in the yard of her previous home in Matura.
Speaking to the media at the Forensic Science Centre, in St James, yesterday, Golabie’s relatives insisted that she was attacked suddenly by a “smiling and laughing man” as she was walking out of a yard of her relative’s home.
A Special Reserve Police Officer has been detained and was assisting police with their investigations up to late yesterday.
“We are real hurt about hearing that she was the one who pulled the knife during a fight when it was not so that happened because her sister and brother was there and saw,” Golabie’s sister, who did not disclose her name, said
The sister said another sister picked her up from their mother’s house and took her to Cemetery Street where she lives and where Golabue would have lived before walking out of the abusive relationship.
“Then they saw the man walking up to her and started ‘chooking’ she (meaning stabbing her). She was not falling but the man kept laughing and smiling while he kept walking behind her and ‘chooking’ her. Is when she began to fall to the ground that she shouted for her sister and brother to take the two children and run. She died right there. The man left and went and stood outside the police station smoking a cigarette.
Golabie’s sister said their mother is very distraught over the incident and what was reported in the media as to what allegedly happened.
She said, “The police were helping her all along because they even took the man’s firearm from him and had him on leave or suspension. I don’t really know but they thought he would have cooled himself and put himself in order. The police even offered her to go to a safe house but she told the Sergeant she was safe at her mother’s house but we just don’t know why she would have allowed her sister to pick her up and carry her there,” the relative said.
The sister described Golabie as a “very nice and loving person who helped everyone around her once she could.”
“It has no time soon or too late but just try to get out because it keeps escalating and it doesn’t stop.
