Forty-three-year-old Mario Heywood has been sentenced to serve 17 years behind bars for raping a nine-year-old girl on three separate occasions in 2018.
At his sentencing hearing yesterday afternoon, Justice Sandil Kissoon told an expressionless Heywood who maintained his innocence, that his vile abuse of the child in the worst way possible had destroyed her innocence.
Underscoring the gravity of the acts committed against the child, Justice Kissoon said that sexual offences against children in particular, had reached “crisis” levels in Guyana; noting that Heywood’s, was one in a litany of such cases confronting the courts at alarming frequency.