There are many sick people out there

Mar 16, 2014 Features / Columnists, My Column

Scarcely a day goes by without something really horrific happening in Guyana. We have had the bizarre case of a man attempting to rob a woman on a road in Sophia when the police just happened to be on patrol.
The man is so resolute about his trade that he opens fire on a party of armed policemen who return fire. It is either that the policemen are so well trained or that they simply cannot shoot to kill. The man lives to be taken into custody but not before he manages to jump into a trench to elude capture.
Another man is probably bent on impressing his wife that he opts to kill himself, probably after telling her that he would. We would never know what he expected but surely he did not expect her reaction. I once saw a movie of a woman so in love with her about-to-be-executed paramour that she hung on to his feet as he dangled from the gibbet.
Surely her weight at his feet would not help and so the man passed to the Great Beyond. In our case, the report is that the woman watched as the man used the rope to fashion his noose. I would not be surprised that she actually accompanied him to buy the rope.
He then fashions his own gallows right before his wife’s eyes and when he took the jump she simply stood there to watch him. It could be that she did not believe him or that she was so petrified that she couldn’t do anything. But then again, it could have been that she simply told herself that if he is so stupid as to kill himself then she wouldn’t stop him.
To take the cake in horror was this report out of Port Kaituma, a community in the North West District. There I was in the newsroom when a colleague called me to enquire if I had heard about the man burning down his home with his wife and children inside. The paper was being put to bed. The news caused me to ask my colleagues to pull out to the stops to find out what happened.
Many of us had contacts with people in Port Kaituma. Nigel McKenzie sprang into action as did Mitzy Campbell. They got hold of people at Port Kaituma and got the story as it unfolded. They got people to take photographs and in the end they got the details.
But even as the story was unfolding shivers were going through me. As a father I could not see my children come to harm. When my sons became teenagers and they began to go out later than I was accustomed to I could not sleep until they got home. And I set the time.
I can count the times I put a cane to their behinds on one hand. I simply could not stand to see them hurt. I enjoy them to this day although they are grown men and women. So when I heard that a man secured his home with his wife and children inside, then set the building on fire I was dumbfounded.
To make matters worse for me, I got a report that people outside heard the children screaming while the fire raged. Then I became angry when I learnt that the sick son of a ‘who cut he hair” as my mother would say, was still alive.
I am of the view that he initially intended to perish in the blaze but when the heat became too much for him he escaped. His wife and children were not so fortunate. They screamed as they died.
Not so long ago, there was another man who killed his children. He hacked them while they slept. I was similarly sickened as were the people in the jail where he was confined. I am told that after the beating his cell mates inflicted on him, he contemplated suicide. He probably found that death was too much to contemplate, the same way as the man who killed his wife and children Friday night.
There is no married couple who did not have confrontations, but it takes reasoning to settle disputes. Of course, there is the view that there is no reasoning with a woman, so if you are wrong say that you are wrong and if you are right say that you are wrong. There is bound to be peace and no need to burn a house with a wife and children inside.
There is going to be a trial if the man is not allowed to escape from custody as some have done in the city. People made a big song and dance about the man being handcuffed to his bed. There were others similarly handcuffed who managed to secure their freedom.
If this one does not escape then some of my money will pay to try him and if he is convicted –lawyers always manage to achieve the impossible—then more of my money will pay to keep him in incarceration.

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There are many sick people out there

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