TWENTY FOUR YEARS

   TWENTY-FOUR years ago yesterday my cousin Monty was kidnapped. His skeleton (that's right: his skeleton!) was found two days later in his burnt out car. The police told me at the time that the burning of the car was done using "an accelerant more flammable than gasoline". 

It took me two years to find out what exactly had happened to my cousin, how it happened and why it happened. Frankly, the story reads like something out of a crime novel. It involves a local as well as a foreign drug lord and police corruption going from the bottom of the Police Service all the way up to the top. I know everything, but, unfortunately, can't prove a damned thing! I know who kidnapped my cousin and I know who pulled the trigger of the gun that ended his life. But, I can't prove it.

At one time when we had the Canadian CoP and his Canadian Deputy I went to see the deputy who knew why and what I was coming about. The deputy met with me and a lawyer friend of mine whom I had brought as a witness. He (the deputy) was surprised that I had somebody with me but hadn't bothered (by his own admission) to read the file. Instead he seemed more interested in finding out what I knew. I told him that I knew a lot but that it didn't make sense having any kind of discussion with him unless and until he had read the file. He promised to do so and also promised that he would call me ... very soon! He never did. Frankly, his attitude raised very ugly and most unnecessary suspicions in my mind that are probably better left unexpressed.

I an very close to a girl that was raped more than 10 years ago and saw for myself up close and personal how devastating that experience was for her. I followed up with the police every day for 6 months after the deed and then on a weekly basis for another additional 10 months, but it was to no avail. The rapist was never caught.

Why am I raising all this now? Because, like most Trinis I have been appalled by the brutal murders (especially of our women) that seem to be climbing almost daily. I felt it when Ashanti, for example, was murdered and I was most upset about Andrea's terrible ordeal. But I also feel for their loved ones who are left with the terrible scars of knowing how absolutely horrible their last hours on the planet must have been.

It is a truism that there is no grief which a length of time will not heal. But it is also very true that when a tragedy (such as the brutal murders of these girls) takes place that no matter that you have no more tears to shed you never forget the injustice meted out to your loved one and you thirst for revenge, i.e., you want their killers to be caught and found guilty and punished. When this doesn't happen you are left with a huge void in your psyche that you fall into again and again ... even after 24 years! The tears go, but the pain never does.

We can pass all the laws we want. We can bring back the death penalty and castrate the rapists. But if we don't catch the criminals everything that we say and do is just so much dust and doesn't mean a thing.