Tragedy strikes Sophia family as toddler drowns in drain

Sep 12, 2013 News

By Romila Boodram
Residents of ‘D’ Field Sophia were thrown into deep mourning yesterday upon hearing the news that one of their youngest members had drowned.
The victim was 14-month-old Dequan Harris who drowned while attempting to cross a plank that serves as a bridge across the drain in front of his home.

Dequan Harris and his mother in happy times.

The child’s mother, Juana Harris, discovered him floating in the shallow drain one hour after she left him unattended at home, to collect her four-year-old daughter from the ‘C’ Field Sophia Nursery school.
At the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) yesterday, the older Harris was so devastated that at one stage she forgot her dead child’s name.
According to the mother of five, her son was sleeping and she asked her brother (who was getting ready to go out) to look at him while she stepped out for a couple of minutes. She however claims that her brother apparently did not hear her request.
“Like he didn’t hear and when he left home, he just pushed in the door and when Dequan wake up, he walked out the door and tried to cross the bridge and that’s when he fell in,” the mother said, in tears.
She explained that while she was walking towards her house with her daughter, she saw her 14-month-old baby floating in the trench. “I pulled my baby out with my own hands,” the woman told this newspaper.
When Kaieteur News visited the area yesterday, neighbours said they heard the woman crying loudly and when they went to enquire, they saw her sitting in her living room with the child lying on the floor in front of her.
“Like she didn’t know what to do and she just sit on the floor with the child in front of her and we had to tell her to take him to the hospital. I don’t know if he was already dead or what but he was not responding,” the neighbour told this publication.
Harris’s mother, Vanessa, who is ill, was inconsolable yesterday. She said that the last time she saw her grandson alive was before she left for the hospital early in the morning. “I was playing with him this morning (yesterday) and he was happy and then I left to go to the hospital because I am sick.”

The dead child’s grandmother points to the drain, where the child’s body was discovered floating.

The elderly woman added that while at the hospital she received a call from one of her neighbours, informing her that her grandson fell into the drain, but she thought it was something minor until she saw his lifeless body at the hospital yesterday.
Meanwhile, a source from the Child Protection Agency said that an investigation will be launched into the child’s death.