“I just desperate for a proper house to live in, that is all I dream about right now and I just wish somebody could listen and hear and help we out. Me husband does work hard and we really trying but we don’t have enough money to build a proper house.”
The words of 31-year-old Nazalena Natasha Houston who over the last almost 11 years has been making a slow climb in returning her life to some form normalcy since a fateful July 31, 2013 that changed her life forever. That was the day the father of her two children, Richard Lord, went on a rampage and chopped her mercilessly but more horrifically he also killed their two young children, Kimberley and Saif. He later took his own life.
She sadly pointed out that had her children still been alive her daughter would have been 17 years old now, and her son 14.
right arm and left hand glove
Not a day goes by when Natasha does not remember her two children, or struggle to understand why God allowed her children to be slaughtered and left her to live minus her right arm and three fingers from her left hand. She said she did not need her severed hand and fingers to remind her of the day her reputed husband of seven years thought he had murdered her as well; the absence of her children is a constant reminder.
Since then, she has worked hard to regain her independence. She has a new partner with whom she now has two children and a third on the way. Her partner also has two children from a previous union.
“I just wish that I could get help to build a new home before this child come,” she told me recently via phone.
“I know that people would say why I making so much children but this one is a mistake, we didn’t going to make another child and he ask me wah I want do but I tell he with me religion we don’t do abortion,” she added.
Natasha and her family of five moved in a one bedroom shack they built last year out of desperation as rent was too high to pay and their efforts to build a proper house on a piece of land she acquired at Tuschen, East Bank Essequibo, have not been successful.
She shared that she has engaged a non-governmental organisation since 2019 and was promised a house but this has not been a reality.
“I talk to them and they promise me. I even meet with the contractor and he tell me one time that the land too wet. And then I would message but he stop answering. I went into them in 2020 but they said the manager didn’t been in office.
“It is hard for me to call and so last year we just build a lil thing and we move in. It deh pun de ground and the people around tell me when it rain it would flood but thank God no big rain ain’t fall since. But like now the rainy season coming and I really want a better house. Dem children getting big,” she told me sadly.
‘Doing it on her own’
Following the tragedy, Natasha was assisted with prosthetics for both of her hands through New York-based Guyanese. While she is happy for the support she recently told me that she took them off to do her every day chores.
“They would be too heavy, you know and I just had to learn to use my left hand with the two fingers. Now I does do nuff thing on me own. I cook. I does wash. I does clean. The only thing me stepdaughter does help comb me and them children hair,” she shared.
“We trying to get money to buy a washing machine because it does be hard to wash because I does have to bend over and scrub the clothes between me legs and it really does be hard. When I was getting the last girl I squeeze her, you know. I had to go to the hospital and when she born she like had a dent on she head but she alright now.
‘We trying, you know. All them children going to school. If only we could get a house. That is all we want right now, a lil help to get a house. If only [the name of the NGO} or somebody else could help we, I would be happy. That is all we want.”
Natasha was only 14 years old when she met the now dead Richard. She had told this newspaper that she was still in school when she met him, during a seven-day religious ritual that was held for an aunt who had died. At the end of the seven days he told her he was returning home.
“He tell me how a nah guh see he again and if I love he, I would go with he…,” she had said.
For many girls that age, that would have been an incredible suggestion, but for one who had a sick mother who barely managed to provide for her and her siblings and who had been abused by a stepfather, home was not necessarily the happiest place.
“I was sad to leave mommy because she been sick and I was the biggest child home, but you know I ain’t use to get nuff thing and he say he love me and is like I say if I get a husband then I can help mommy,” she had said shortly after the fateful incident.
Richard was 19 and appeared to be a knight in shining armour for Natasha, but shortly after she moved in with him, his brother and father, reality struck when he started to abuse her. By then, she felt it was too late, especially since her mother had begged her to return home and her refusal was met with the parting words, ‘You mek you bed hard you guh have to lie down on it’.
She had eventually run away with her two children and was in hiding, but he found her.
Below is how I chronicled that fateful day Natasha endured almost 11 years ago in a story published in 2014.
The fateful day
Early on the morning of July 31, 2013 she hurried out of a minibus (she was on her way to the probation office), with two year-old Saif in her arms and Kimberly holding on to her skirt.
“I tell she walk fast because I know if Richard there he would not do we nothing if we meet in the compound.
“But when we near to meet and I just feel somebody [it was Richard] grab me from me neck back and drag me and push me in this car and me baby fall out me hand and he pick him up and throw he in de car and push Kimberly in…” Natasha said.
As soon as she was in the car, Natasha said, the man started to beat her and she begged the driver to drive the car into the Vreed-en-Hoop police station which was a stone’s throw away.
Instead, the man turned the car around and drove in the direction of Tuschen.
“All this time he beating me and asking me and Kimberly which man I went by… We passing Leonora police station and I beg the driver again. I say ‘you wouldn’t like you daughter to get beat like this, drive in the station’ but he ain’t say nothing, he just keep driving.”
He drove them home and Richard dragged her out of the car and marched her to their home instructing the children to follow. An older sister was in her mother’s home and she asked Natasha “why me come back, and I tell she with the passion that I come fuh get me dead.”
In the house, the man continued to beat Natasha and even assaulted Kimberly whom he felt was withholding information.
Her mother was called and she spoke to the couple but Natasha had decided that she would not continue the relationship and this angered him even more.
“He beat me den tell me cook fuh he and I tell he I not cooking to give he more strength to beat me and he say he guh cook…”
He asked her for sex, she told him no.
“I tell he I seeing me health but he still tek off me clothes and sex me…two time he sex me with all the blood…”
He continued to abuse her throughout the day and eventually he said he was going to leave and instructed little Kimberly to pack his bag which she did. He then said he was going to leave at the end of the week but Natasha told him she wanted him out of the house immediately.
Blows rained again and her daughter ran to her grandmother and told her to call the police. She returned to the house and was forced to eat some food by her father.
Natasha’s mother was standing outside the closed door and said she was calling the police and they could hear her making the call.
Natasha was making porridge for her baby, her back to Richard when she felt what she thought was a burning sensation.
Seconds later the horrifying reality hit her; her arm was hanging by a thin piece of skin; Richard had chopped it off. She started to scream, the children started to scream and her mother was screaming outside the locked door.
Natasha held up her almost severed arm as a barrier as Richard continued to chop and he sliced the arm in several other places.
She instructed her little girl to run but as she fought to open the door her father chopped her and the sight remains imprinted on Natasha’s mind.
“She trying to open the door and is just so Richard fire a chop and she neck just fall forward, come off like and then he just tek he foot and kick over she body. When she neck fall forward the blood and all the chicken and rice she been eating fly up in the air,” Natasha recalled chillingly.
Her daughter’s body lay bleeding, her two-year-old son was crouched in a corner hollering and Richard had her by her “thick long hair.”
He loosed the hair and she tried to open the door for her baby boy to run but Richard struck with his cutlass again, chopping off three of her fingers and part of her thumb as she held onto the door knob. He then chopped again, this time at the back of her neck, Natasha dropped to her knees.
“When he fire the chop is like most a meh hair get chop off and is the hair mek the cutlass just slice me neck a lil, but it still bleeding and I ain’t know if he think me neck get chop bad and me dead but I just couldn’t cry and scream no more like me throat get lock off…”
The place was dark and the baby was still hollering and Natasha said she saw “the shiny cutlass in the air and it come down back and then no mo sound.
“When the cutlass come down I feel like something pitch on me and I don’t know if it was Saif blood or something but I know he dead…”
She remained on her knees while Richard dragged the bodies of his murdered children and lay them next to their mother before running out of the house and escaping. He was discovered dead a few days later as Natasha recuperated in the hospital, a process that denied her the opportunity to say goodbye to her babies.
It was a bloody end to a relationship that should have never been.
It is a day that remains etched in Natasha’s mind but she still has life and wants to live. She now has two other children and her desire is to have a proper roof over their heads. Hopefully it becomes a reality soon.
