An East Canje, Berbice woman was strangled and found wrapped in a bag along the Corentyne Highway in Number 1 Village yesterday and a soldier is the main suspect and was detained at his base in Georgetown.
Donalesa Parks, 29, a hairdresser of Number Two Village, East Canje Berbice, left home on Wednesday to head to Islington, East Bank Berbice, to meet with a client to do her hair, relatives told Stabroek News yesterday.
However, after her client, who was coming from Linden, eventually cancelled, Parks reportedly left and headed to Number 1 Village, Corentyne to meet with the suspect at his house.
Her uncle, Mortimer Amsterdam, 56, said that they were told that Parks left Islington around 1 pm on Wednesday. “She does do business with the boy [suspect]. So he tell she he get detergents to sell and she going to collect it because she does always collect them things and sell it.”
According to the uncle, after Parks’ mother discovered that she had not returned home on Wednesday evening, she contacted an aunt and they began searching for her yesterday morning. Eventually, they arrived at the suspect’s house where his sister informed them that her brother left home early that morning – several hours before they had arrived.
She also reported to Parks’ relatives that she last saw the deceased woman on Wednesday evening going upstairs with her brother with a bottle of wine.
Relatives of the suspect told Stabroek News that he had returned home earlier this week on leave and had informed them that he had to return to his base in two weeks’ time. However, when he left home yesterday morning in the wee hours he informed his sister that he had to go back to base immediately for work.
At that point, relatives of Parks proceeded to the road where while waiting for a hire car they noticed some of her items in a drain opposite the suspect’s house. Upon investigating further, they found Parks’ handbag and a slipper belonging to her, and then eventually her body was discovered in the same drain some distance from the belongings.
The body was wrapped in a garbage bag, and according to a senior police source, it bore marks consistent with strangulation.
The police were immediately summoned to the scene and the body was transported to the Port Mourant Hospital and then to Ramoo’s Funeral Parlour in Rose Hall Town, Corentyne, where it is being kept pending a post-mortem examination.
Parks, the mother of a five-year-old was described as a quiet and easy-going person, Amsterdam yesterday noted, “When you talk to her she does smile and laugh. She is very nice, a shy, quiet girl.”
At the crime scene, hospital, and parlour, her relatives cried loudly and profusely, in disbelief that she had been found dead.
Meanwhile, relatives of the suspect, who was identified to this newspaper as Collin Hazel, 33, said that they too were in shock. His mother told Stabroek News, that she could not believe her son was capable of such a deed. She confessed to being confused at the discovery and said she felt sorry for the relatives of the victim. “He does come in front and stay and hardly talk, talk, only when he see me, but I can’t believe he would do something like this, this is not like him.”
A senior police source yesterday afternoon told Stabroek News that arrangements were still being made yesterday afternoon to have the suspect handed over from his base to investigators in Berbice. Furthermore, according to the source, the suspect’s sister was also questioned at the Albion Police Station.
