Aaliyah’s autopsy today

Police sources said that two persons remain in custody. One of the suspects — a woman — told police that she last saw Aaliyah alive on Easter Sunday evening when a male relative took the child for a bath.

Police sources told Newsday that Government forensic pathologist Dr Valery Alexandrov, indicated to Homicide Bureau officers that he wanted to postpone the autopsy to today to give himself enough time to carry out as thorough a forensic examination of the child’s body to determine cause of death.

Yesterday, relatives said a teenaged relative of Aaliyah had made several attempts to leave an abusive relationship at the hands of a male relative at a house in San Francique near Siparia.

Relatives said the woman had packed her bags and said she and Aaliyah would leave the wooden and galvanise house at Maria David Trace, on the morning of Easter Sunday.

Hours later, Aaliyah’s bleeding body was found near a load of gravel at a slope outside the house. Aaliyah was taken up by a female relative and placed on a cushion at the front of the house. She later died.

At the Marigold Street, Siparia home of Aaliyah’s grandfather Victor Garcia, 56, which she regularly visited, relatives were in a sombre mood yesterday. Garcia, wiping away tears from his eyes, said: “I should have taken her away from that house. I knew something was not right because she used to be scared whenever she left my home to go back to that house. I loved my granddaughter so much.”

On Sunday morning, Garcia said, his son Matthew accompanied by a friend went to the house at Maria David Trace to get Aaliyah and her female relative. “But she (the female relative) was hesitant to leave. She had packed her bags and Aaliyah’s clothes but then she told Matthew to return for her and Aaliyah the next day. The next day was too late. We heard later that day that Aaliyah was dead,”Garcia said.

Up to late yesterday, a 23-year-old man and 18-year-old woman were still being questioned by police officers. The two are being kept at different police stations.