A family of 16, seven of whom are minors, is now traumatised and living in fear after they were robbed twice over a two-day period by two men. The victims were relieved of all their valuables.
The victims recalled that the first robbery took place on Friday at around 01:30h and the other in the wee hours of Sunday at their Cove and John East Coast Demerara (ECD) home.
In an interview with INews on Tuesday, one of the victims related that in the first instance, the children’s grandmother woke up to check the time on her phone but she realised it was missing.
“She turned on the light to look for it and it was then she realised that the house was ransacked. When she looked outside, she saw two guys running up the road, so she raised an alarm and started shouting ‘thief, thief’. At the time she was at the bottom flat of the two-storey wooden building…”, the woman stated.
Upon inspection, the elderly woman noticed that the louvre panes on one of the windows on the bottom flat of the building were removed, and believed that the bandits might have gotten access into the house while the family was sleeping.
The family was robbed of their mobile phones, one electronic tablet, a quantity of jewellery, all their groceries, and their life savings which is about $150,000 in cash.
“The grandmother lives upstairs but the children’s father went to work at sea so she come downstairs to sleep with them…These children were traumatised, when you looked at them you can see the fear in their eyes,” a family member told this publication.
After hearing about the robbery, the father of the children left his place of employment and returned home to ensure that his family was safe.
Meanwhile, on Sunday morning at around the same time as the first robbery, the thieves returned to the family’s home with the aim of taking what was left from the upper flat of the building.
The family said when the men arrived, they were not asleep since they were scared from the night before. When the men broke into the house, the family managed to apprehend one of the suspects, while the other escaped into the dark.
“This house is on a dam. It is a very small wooden, old, upstairs and downstairs house. The family is very poor and the thieves took all their savings. The children can’t even do their school work because they took the one and only tablet that the teacher use to send work for them on. They cannot afford to buy another one,” the saddened relative said.
After apprehending the bandit, he was taken to the Cove and John Police Station and handed over to the police.
This publication understands that the suspect was released without being charged. In light of this, the family is now even more fearful for their lives, since the man threatened to kill them at the time he was caught.
“This is poor people… if they had caught somebody, at least they could have given back them the things that they took… we think like the man pay the Police and the matter went south,” the relative added.
The family is, therefore, pleading with higher authorities to look into the matter so that justice can be served.
