The law-abiding neighbours of Norma Holder who felt it was their duty to check on her may be brave enough to give the police information that may lead to her killer being traced. Hopefully their courage and their sense of justice will bear fruit. One reason for the occurrence of appalling crimes such as these is the murderers’ belief that they will not be caught, like the vast majority of killers in T&T today.
The front pages of Sunday’s and yesterday’s daily newspapers were particularly grim. On Saturday the news had broken that two bodies had been found by police searching for four female members of one family who had gone missing from their home at Brasso Seco, Paria, on October 26.
Irma Rampersad, two of her daughters, Felicia and Jenelle Gonzales, and her one-year-old granddaughter Shania Amoroso have not been seen since. The story in the following day’s papers reported that the bodies flung over a cliff in the forest nearby were those of a woman, who had been shot, and a small child who may have been beaten to death.
Yesterday the country awoke to learn that a woman in her seventies, a pillar of her community, had been sexually assaulted and murdered. The majority of the hundreds of murders now being committed annually in T&T are described by the police as gang-related, and the implication is that the victim has done something that has led to his own fate, by being a gang member, involved in organised violent crime. It is still terrible that so many men—some of them still boys—die needlessly because they hold their own lives and the lives of others so cheap.
Perhaps hardened by hearing these stories over and over again, some people are no longer moved by such killings, forgetting that the deaths of these desperate young men are not the end of anything, but only the beginning of mourning for the mothers they leave behind, and for the children who will grow up fatherless and whose own lives may be blighted by that unfillable absence. In this latest spate of terrible murders, it was not criminals but women and a baby who were targeted.
Norma Holder lived in Laventille, but like the vast majority of the people who live there, she had nothing to do with the illegal gang-related activities that have led to police describing it as a hot spot. She was murdered as she returned from church, in what may have been a robbery gone wrong. It says much about her and the area that her neighbours very soon noticed that something was amiss and went to check on her—only to find her dead.
The fate of the family abducted from Brasso Seco is still a mystery. The country, like the family, is praying and hoping that there are no more bodies to be found and that the other two women are alive and safe somewhere. Whatever the outcome of the continuing search in Paria, there are already at least two killers who must be brought to justice.
The law-abiding neighbours of Norma Holder who felt it was their duty to check on her may be brave enough to give the police information that may lead to her killer being traced. Hopefully their courage and their sense of justice will bear fruit. One reason for the occurrence of appalling crimes such as these is the murderers’ belief that they will not be caught, like the vast majority of killers in T&T today.
It is incidents like these that shock the entire population and make it impossible to give any credence to or take comfort from announcements by the police that crime levels are down.