Village in shock after brutal murder

Last Sunday, Moonie, now 62, again found herself toiling in the sugarcane fields, this time in the dark of night, searching for her missing six-year-old grandson, Sean Luke Lumfai.

The boy disappeared from the family’s home at Henry Street (west) that afternoon and two days later their worst fears were realised — he had been murdered. Sean’s body was found just 300 feet away from the house under a patch of grass. He had been sodomised. His killer plunged a cane stalk into his body, rupturing internal organs. The second year pupil of Waterloo Hindu School bled to death, pathologist Dr Eastlyn McDonald Burris found.

Sean was born in the United States and his brutal rape and murder grabbed international attention with reports about his horrific death in the Detroit Free Press and Miami Herald. Both articles stated, “Sean’s death comes as Trinidad, which had a population of 1.3 million, reported the most violent month on record with 43 homicides reported so far in March.”

According to reports, Sean was lured with cornflakes and Supligen to go fishing with a group of boys on Sunday evening.

Although he was not accustomed going to the bay area, which involves a ten-minute walk through a cane field, he followed them.

The elderly woman’s brother, Kenny Moonie, 59, said the bay area was an attraction to many boys in the village.

“Sean had a pet turtle, so it eh hard see why he wanted to go fishing,” he said.

Another boy who was in the group said after the older boys caught a “mamatater” (a local fish) he left and headed toward his home a few streets away from Sean’s house. He said the older boys called out for him to come back, but he kept walking toward home. The boy said when he turned around to look at them, Sean was happy and smiling but one of the older boys gave him an evil look.

“He was looking ‘angryish.’ They watch me walk down the road and they call out to me to come back. But I went home,” he said.

Golsin Moonie recalled the days when children, including her two daughters, roamed the village freely without fear. She was newly married when she moved into Henry Street, a grassy trace bordered by cane fields.

She said when Sean’s mother, Pauline, was two years old, she and her husband separated and she single-handedly converted their home, which was originally a dirt hut, into a concrete structure. She recalled the days when she went out to work before the sun came up. In those days, she said, it was safe to leave her two daughters alone at home.

“You could leave the children and go anywhere. Everybody was family and the children were safe here,” she said

Moonie and her brothers, Kenny Moonie, 59, and Ramjit Binda, 55, whose family was one of the first to settle in Orange Valley, say Sean’s murder was the second to take place in their agricultural village where fishing and cane farming are the main pastimes. The other occurred more than half a century ago, Kenny Moonie said.

“I born and grow up here. To my knowing it had one little murder over 50 years ago when a man hit ah next man with a hoe (garden tool) and he happened to die.”

Kenny Moonie said over the years the village has developed from only a few dirt houses using flambeaux at night to an area with electricity, telephones and pipe-borne water, and schools and churches.

Ramnarine Maharaj, a neighbour of the Moonies for almost 40 years, insisted there were no criminal activity in Orange Valley.

“It don’t have any kind of crime since I here. Everybody, although they is not family, they live like family,” Maharaj, 60, said.

According to the Moonies, in recent years, strangers have started filtering into the village, with strange vehicles entering the area at all hours of the night.

They said strangers would be seen walking the streets.

Some of them began to bully the children, as was the case when Sean’s cousin, Kyle, 6, was locked up in a rusty old stove that had been dumped on the side of the road.

Last Sunday, Sean was playing in Maharaj’s yard only hours before he was lured away by the group of boys.

His mother said he was a brave and friendly boy and like the other children on the street he would go to his neighbours’ house to play.

Recalling the last time he saw Sean alive, Maharaj said, “He had a black scooter and was playing in the sand. That was about 1.30 in the afternoon. I leave him in the yard and I went inside to eat my lunch. I couldn’t do nothing. I didn’t know what going on.”

When Sean’s grandmother came home that night and was told that her grandson was missing, she instinctively went into the canefields in search of him. Alone and barefoot, she searched until the sun came up.

The boy’s body was discovered on Tuesday morning by police tracker dogs.

“Orange Valley was never so,”she said.

“This place was a bush patch with a trace. I don’t know how things get so.”