‘My mother was evil’ says teenaged son of suicide cop

While neighbours and friends voiced their views about suicide cop Reffic Mohammed and the rocky relationship he shared with his common-law wife, Kamla Paltoo, it was the couple’s son, Steven Mohammed, who related an eye-opening tale of horror, evil, infidelity and suffering. “My mother was evil. She regularly fought with my father and went for days, weeks and months and sometimes brought men in the house. These men would sometimes beat him and she herself would embarrass him with the men or beat him while walking the streets of Sangre Grande. “One day I came home and found her in the house with a rasta man and she told me not to tell my dad. Sometime later, after he left and she saw me watching her she “cuff” me in my mouth and burst my lip. Many times my father would tell me of different occasions she called him to meet her in a bar and when he got there, she would call from another bar and make the same request.

“Other times when he found her she would be surrounded by men and he could not talk to or touch her. One day, a man broke down our front door and dragged her out because he found she was taking too long... and my father could do nothing. “There was another day I found my sister Sascha and my name written in a bible in blood.  Another time we found marijuana and I have actually seen her smoking it.” These statements were made to Newsday after a funeral service under Muslim rites at the home of Zobida Barkly, Reffic’s older sister at her Guaico/Tamana home in Sangre Grande. Mohammed, 43, fatally shot himself outside the St Joseph Police Station last Friday night after he shot Kamla in her back and hand. “My mother drank, smoked, ran down men, embarrassed my father and ill-treated us,” continued Steven, 13. She liked Sascha, five, because she was small and could be carried anywhere, but hated me because she was afraid that I would tell my father. “She even told us and the police one day, when she stripped herself naked in front them at home and bathed herself, that she has a bottle of gramoxone to mix and give us.

“My father loved her, but she treated him badly and it was only when payday came and they had money to drink I saw them happy... but that would last for two days and then its back to square one. Several times, when daddy was at work, she threw me out of the house at sometime five and six in the morning, and I had to walk by my aunt to sleep and go to school. “One time daddy slept with me by my aunt and left from there to go to work and sometime later she called and said she had reported to the police that he had beat her the same time that he was with me. She even showed black and blue marks on her body along with a medical certificate.” Reffic Mohammed, an officer of 22 years, who was last attached to the Traffic Department at the St. Joseph Police Station where he got the gun, is reported to have cried to several friends and neighbours about the problems he was experiencing with his wife, but no one was able to assist him.