Girl, 9, screams for murdered mom

Little Christina Persad, a standard three pupil of the Rousillac Presbyterian Primary School, only learnt of her mother and step-father’s deaths after the autopsies were performed at the Forensic Science Centre, St James yesterday.

Christina’s grandmother Nicole Anthony, 45, told Newsday that relatives did not know how to tell a nine-year-old girl that her mother was killed.

“How do you do that?” she asked. The emotional grandmother said she and relatives waited until late yesterday evening before telling the girl what occurred. “When we told her what happened.

She screamed and screamed and she bawled. She kept screaming saying she wanted her mother now.

It hurt watching how hurt she was, it really hurt me to tell her that her mother was not coming back,” Anthony said. Christina was the only child of her mother and Anthony said their bond was unbreakable.

On the morning of the killings, Christina was spending the night at her grandmother’s (Anthony) house.

“My granddaughter could have been dead.

She could have been killed with her mother and step-father in the house, but she was spending the night with me. I look at her and see she is not doing well now. She is struggling to cope. She is hurting now that she knows,”Anthony said.

Christina, she said, will now live with her father.

“Relatives and I would be there for her always, but I know it would not be easy,”she said. Christina’s mother and step-father were shot once and twice to the head respectively as they lay on their bed in their Limefield Road, Cochrane Village home on Tuesday morning.

Police said that at 1 am, gunshots were heard inside the couple’s house.

Anthony, who lives nearby, heard the shots and ran to her daughter’s house to investigate. On seeing the bodies of her daughter and son-inlaw covered in blood on the bed, Anthony screamed, causing other neighbours to run out to see what had happened. The couple, she said, were soaked in blood. Her daughter, she said, appeared dead while Mohammed groaned and said to call an ambulance.

Investigators later found a bag of marijuana in the roadway. It is believed that in their haste to get away, the killers dropped the bag of marijuana.

Anthony was a security officer while Mohammed worked part-time as a labourer in the Point Fortin Borough Corporation.

Funeral arrangements are still being made by their families and up to press time, no arrest had been made as investigations continue.