Ramesh Bess’ last fight

Jul 25, 2010 Features / Columnists, Murder and Mystery

– his final bout was in a death-battle far from the ring…

Anyone who followed boxing during the seventies would remember him.
Slightly-built but ferocious. Fighting from light-fly to bantam division.
He was Ramesh Bess, an amateur boxing champion who would go on to represent Guyana in Cuba, while turning professional in the latter stages of his career.
But no one dreamed that his final, desperate fight would be fought far from the National Sports Hall, in a sand-pit on the Soesdyke/Linden Highway.
After his fighting career ended, Bess had a brief stint in the Guyana National Service and he dropped out of sight of the media.
We would later learn that he had married, had fathered five children, and was working as a checker with a businessman who owned a sand pit at Swan, on the Soesdyke/Linden highway.
His boss and fellow workers nicknamed him ‘Boxer’ because he often reminisced about his days in the ring.
At around 07:00 hrs on Saturday, August 8, 2004, his boss, Mangra Raghoo, entered his van and drove to the sand-pit. In the vehicle was another checker who was to relieve the now 50-yar-old ex-boxer.
At the time, Bess lived in a small, one-bedroom home with his wife, Wendy and their five small children. The eldest was seven, while the youngest was a baby girl who was just eleven days old.
They stopped at the hut where Bess was stationed.
But just as the former boxer was about to enter the van, when a gunshot rang out.
Sand pit owner Mr. Raghoo then saw two masked men—one with a shotgun and another with a cutlass—emerge from behind the van.
Pointing their weapons at Raghoo, the bandits ordered him to hand over the day’s earnings.
Pleading with the robbers to spare his life, the businessman explained to the gunmen that all the cash was at the sand-pit.
The masked men then ordered him to drive to the sand-pit, but Raghoo told them that the battery was dead, and they would have to push the van.
While the businessman was pleading to the robbers, a truck emerged from the sand-pit. This distracted the bandits, who began to head towards the truck. Raghoo and the checker who was to have relieved Bess took the opportunity to flee into dense vegetation a short distance away.
They remained there for about half an hour. Eventually, Raghoo heard some of his employers, who had feared that he had been kidnapped, calling his name.
The businessman emerged from his hiding place and assured his workers that no one had been hurt.
But he was wrong.
Unknown to the businessman, that single shot that the gun-toting robber had fired had caught Ramesh Bess at the back of the head, killing him instantly.
The police later learned that after killing Bess, the gunmen headed to another sand-pit.
The checker at the sand-pit was in a hut preparing to have a cup of tea, when he saw a masked man with a ‘long gun’ emerge from the trees nearby. As he watched, the man, pointing the gun, began to walk slowly towards the hut. He then observed a shorter man, who was masked and brandishing a cutlass, standing by one of the windows of the hut.
“Hand over the money,” the masked men said. The checker immediately handed the men $15,000 that he had collected from the day’s customers.
Ordering the checker to lie facedown, the men ransacked the hut for other valuables. After finding nothing, the bandit with the gun discharged a round, which shattered a speaker-box in the hut.
They then fled on foot.
Police ranks eventually arrived and scoured the area for the killers, but came up empty-handed.
Mangra Raghoo was forced to keep his sand-pit closed for a week, out of fear of another attack.
But the gunmen never returned.
Police never got a clue as to their identity.
It is almost as if they never existed.

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