Death visits Mrs. Doobay

Apr 29, 2018 Features / Columnists, Murder and Mystery

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She welcomed her visitor with refreshments;He beat her to death with a hammer

By Michael Jordan

The van with the two alleged killers exited the police station.
I followed at a discreet distance.
Eventually, the police van stopped in Stone Avenue, Campbellville.
The cops, accompanied by the two handcuffed men, got out. A brutal and baffling murder investigation was about to end.
It had begun on the afternoon of May 24, 2011, when detectives got a call that sent them to a property at Echilibar Villas, Campbellville.
The residence belonged to Ramsundar Doobay, the Head of Internal Medicine at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation.
Dr. Doobay told the police that he had arrived at his home at around four-thirty p.m. He was accompanied by a nephew.
He called for his wife, 58-year-old Sharanie Doobay, called ‘Monica’, to open the door, but got no answer.

Dr. Doobay, the ranks were told, eventually sought assistance from his nephew to remove a few panes from a window on the upper flat, since those in the lower flat were reinforced with metal grills.
The nephew then climbed through the window. Finding no one upstairs, he then ventured to the bottom flat.
He found Sharanie Doobay, fully clothed, lying dead in a pool of blood near the kitchen.
She had been struck at least four times in the head with a blunt instrument. One of the wounds was to the back of the head, another at the side, and two to the top of the skull.
Detectives who examined the body found “two balls of hair” clutched in her right hand.
One of the fingers on her left hand was smashed. The police suspected that she sustained the injury while trying to ward of the killer’s blows, and that she managed to grab the perpetrator with her right hand.
But the detectives were baffled. They had found no sign of forced entry. And what kind of killer would leave a substantial sum of cash behind? Some $10M was still in the house.
Dr. Doobay’s licenced 9mm Glock pistol was also left untouched.
Detectives found no trace of the murder weapon, despite a thorough search of the premises.
A pathologist indicated that Mrs. Doobay was killed about two and a half hours before she was found.
Crime Scene investigators also found what appeared to be traces of blood in the Doobays’ kitchen sink and also in a bedroom sink.
That seemed to indicate that the killer(s) washed themselves before leaving the scene.
But who could that killer be?
Whoever he was, he had entered and escaped unseen. No one in the area claimed to have witnessed any suspicious individuals in the vicinity of the Doobay’s residence.
In fact, one resident only realised that anything was amiss when she saw the doctor and nephew removing the window panes.
To some residents, Mrs. Doobay was an intensely private person who occasionally had close relatives over for religious functions.
They also said she was not the sort to open her door to strangers. Relatives also said that the doctor and his wife were very close and had been married for more than 30 years.
The investigators suspected that someone that Mrs. Doobay knew well had bludgeoned her in a fit of rage.

Working on that theory, police briefly detained a relative of the slain woman.
They also subjected Dr. Doobay to extensive questioning; even searching his car and checking the vehicle for possible bloodstains. They also took hair samples from the physician.
Five days after the killing, the detectives appeared to make a vital breakthrough.
Phone records retrieved from the Doobays’ phone revealed that Mrs. Doobay had received a call from a friend on the afternoon that she was killed.
Mrs. Doobay reportedly told the friend that ‘Mark’ her nephew, and his friend, were visiting at the time.
The investigators had been questioning that nephew.
At first, the relative, 38-year-old Mark Singh, denied that he had entered Mrs. Doobay’s house on the day of the murder.
However, under intense questioning, Singh stated he and a friend had visited Mrs. Doobay around 2.00 p.m. on the same day she was killed.
The nephew said that they drank water and beverages while in the house. He claimed that his 58-year-old aunt was still alive when he and the friend left.
Investigators took the nephew and the friend, friend, Shakir Mohamed, into custody. They also impounded a car that they suspected was used to transport the killer or killers to and from the scene.
MURDER WEAPON FOUND

At around noon May 31, 2011, with the two handcuffed suspects in a van, detectives headed to a trench in Stone Avenue, Campbellville.

A senior crime scene investigator lowered a metal detector into the trench. Two ranks then entered the trench and began the search for a hammer that the suspects had allegedly disposed of.
However, an hour elapsed without anything being found.
By then, a crowd began to gather and some onlookers began to hurl remarks at the suspects. Some suggested that the suspects assist in the search.
After another fruitless hour had passed, some of the detectives left the scene in a pickup. They returned with three vagrants.
Stripping to their underwear, the vagrants entered the trench. In less than ten minutes, one of the men held up a plastic-wrapped claw hammer.
The murder weapon had been found.
MOTIVE
And the motive for the murder?
Mark Singh, the nephew, had lived at a Plaisance, East Coast Demerara property that his aunt owned.
But Mrs. Doobay had threatened to evict him and sell the property because he had failed to pay the rates and taxes
That threat was enough for the nephew to resolve to murder his aunt.
Mark Singh told the police that on May 24, 2011, he visited his aunt. He claimed that his friend, Shakir Mohamed, a taxi driver, accompanied him.
Mrs. Doobay let them in, and he handed over some money that he owed his aunt.
The men allegedly then pretended to be hungry and she gave them refreshments.
But when her back was turned, the nephew sneaked up on his aunt and struck her repeatedly on the head with a hammer.
He claimed that they then left in the friend’s car, taking a bag of cash and the murder weapon. Apparently unknown to them, another bag with some $10M more was in the house.
They then wrapped the hammer in a plastic bag and dumped it in a trench at the corner of Stone Avenue and Fourth Street, Campbellville. That area was just a corner away from the Doobay’s residence.
On June 1, 2011, Mark Singh and his friend, taxi driver Shakir Mohamed, were charged and remanded for the murder of Mrs. Doobay.
But their lawyer, Gordon Gilhuys, alleged that the ranks who arrested his clients placed a black plastic bag over the men’s heads. He claimed that they were forced to sign confession statements.

MOHAMED’S STATEMENT

The prosecution had presented a caution statement in which it was alleged that Mohamed revealed that he had met with Mark Singh about two weeks before the crime was committed.
Mohamed allegedly told the police that Singh said that he was paying his aunt’s rates and taxes and that “It was getting to he and he plan fuh kill she.”
Mohamed, according to the statement, recalled that on May 24, 2011 he and Singh were at the home of Mrs. Doobay, but Singh was the one who took a hammer and clubbed his aunt to the head.
A senior police rank testified that Mohamed informed the investigators that while they were in Mrs. Dobay’s home, the aunt received a call from England.
He recounted that he was in front of Singh when Singh “tek the hammer in the plastic bag and lash she (the aunt) wan good set a lash to she mole and the base ah she head. She scream and I ease her to the ground in the kitchen.”
The accused is said to have told police that the woman was still moving but her nephew “give she one more lash in she head and she stop moving.”
He allegedly told police that Mark subsequently left him with his motionless aunt in the kitchen and went to the back of the house.
Mohamed had allegedly stated that Singh returned sometime later with a bag. He had no knowledge of the contents of the bag but he suspected that it was money.
He told investigators that after leaving the residence his suspicions were confirmed, as Sigh, who had no money earlier in the day, was subsequently able to pay off a debt he owed to a shop.
According to the statement, Mohamed also detailed that after leaving the residence Singh tossed the murder weapon (the hammer wrapped in black bag) into a gutter at the corner of Stone Avenue and Fourth Street, Campbellville.
DEATH AND ACQUITTAL
Mark Singh never stood trial for his aunt’s murder.
On Monday, June 4, 2012, he was taken to the Georgetown Hospital after suffering from what was said to be a severe case of asthma.
He took a turn for the worse and succumbed the following day.
On January 28, 2016, after a second trial, Shakir Mohamed, the co-accused, was acquitted.
Justice Navindra Singh had upheld a no-case submission made by his defence attorney Maxwell McKay.
Justice Singh highlighted that while the prosecution advanced that Mohamed was operating in a joint enterprise with Mark Singh, the caution statement and the evidence led in the case did not substantiate such a pact.
In brief remarks while granting Mohamed his freedom, Justice Singh said: “Perhaps only you really know what happened that day.”
The judge also said Mohamed could have done things differently by reporting the matter to the police after witnessing Doobay being murdered.
“I believe Mark Singh killed Mrs. Doobay, but you [Mohamed] could have and should have done things differently after, by at least going to the police.”
“Perhaps in a strange turn of events, I guess justice was served in a way, as I’m told that Mark Singh has died.”
“Good luck,” Justice Singh told Mohamed. “Watch how you conduct yourself and try to do things differently,”
If you have any information on this case or other unusual incident please contact us at our Lot 24 Saffon Street, Charlestown offices.
You can also reach us on telephone numbers: 22-58458, 22-58491, or 22-58465. You need not disclose your identity.
You can also contact Michael Jordan on his email addresses [email protected] [email protected]

 

 

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