Latest update March 24th, 2025 5:40 AM
Husband of Ocean View accident victim wonders if wife’s killer is enjoying Christmas
By Dale Andrews
These past few weeks Colin Tull, a carpenter, has had little time for himself; he’s been busy helping others with the finishing touches to their homes for the festive season.
Tull has deliberately neglected his own house and is drowning himself in work on other people’s houses, hoping that it will muffle the pain he has had to endure for the past 10 months.
Do you remember the woman who was killed by a speeding pick-up driven by a drunken youth, while she was standing outside the Ocean View International Hotel, awaiting transportation to take her home?
That woman was Lovina Tull, Colin Tull’s wife. I had covered the story; it was very touching for me, since we lived in the same East Coast Demerara village of Melanie Damishana. I had bumped into Tull a few times after but our meeting last Friday was an eye opener for me.
Colin Tull (right) took time out to remember his wife Lovina by painting her tomb yesterday.
While I was busy preparing my home to brighten the spirits of my household and to accommodate visitors for the Christmas season, Tull could think of no such luxuries.
He has been mourning his wife’s death ever since that fateful night in February and cannot say when his grief will end.
On Friday I met up with him again. I was cleaning my yard and he rode up on his motorcycle for a bit of banter. Obviously our conversation centered on his wife’s death and the fact that the person who had killed her was living freely in another jurisdiction, having fled before a Magistrate could sentence him.
I wanted someone to fix a door for me and when I mentioned it, he offered to take the job.
We continued to chat and it really dawned on me that here was a man still in deep mourning for the love of his life.
His efforts are now focused on seeking justice for the death of his wife. Yesterday he took time to visit her tomb to give it a facelift, convinced in his mind that his wife will appreciate the gesture since she would have been the one to clean house and prepare for the holidays.
This year however, there will be no such cleaning and cooking.
“I ain’t really got a Christmas, I just hanging in,” he told me yesterday as he cleared what had grown around his wife’s tomb in the Paradise cemetery.
“She would have been cooking a lot of food, baking black cake, sponge cake, whatever. She like those things.”
He spoke to me as if his wife was at home doing just that, but I sensed that deep down inside of him, he knew that he was a lonely man for the Christmas.
When I asked him what are his plans for the Christmas now that his wife is no longer there and the fact that they had no children together, his response was to the point; “I don’t know what will happen. I don’t even know if the house will fix away for Christmas because she’s not there. The pain is still there; you must feel a way because we were that close. “
He’s not even too sure if he will be visiting other relatives and friends, so devastated he still is.
But he is sure that some of his relatives will come to comfort him during this period which is bound to cause him much grief.
But while Tull is grieving, he couldn’t help but think about his wife’s killer 25-year-old Hafraz Mangroo, who is said to be a nephew of Education Minister Priya Manickchand.
“I wonder if he’s enjoying Christmas. I would want to know if he would sit down at home and enjoy a Christmas, knowing what he did. I want to know if he family would be happy for the pain he is causing me, when they tek he and send he out of the country,” the grieving husband said.
“If I had done that to their family, how they would’a feel towards me?” he asked.
I thought about my family and I realized how fortunate I am.
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