Mom’s death fall still under probe

Assistant Commissioner of Police Garfield Moore told Sunday Newsday on Friday evening investigators are still reviewing evidence about her death before ruling it was suicide.

Family reports to the police revealed Ragoobar, a mother of a three-month-old baby, had a history of suffering with depression.

Also, an autopsy by pathologist Dr Valery Alexandrov indicates “death was consistent with the deceased jumping”, a police report on the case states.

The preliminary findings of the police is that Ragoobar’s death was “unnatural”, Moore said, however adding their enquires are not over.

Ragoobar “may have fallen” from the three-storey villa at Mot Mot Ridge, in Old Grange, Tobago where the 28-year-old woman, her husband and her family, including her sister, Charlotte Young Singh and her mother, were on vacation.

Ragoobar and her family are from Cardral Crescent, San Fernando.

The police report states that on September 5, Singh awoke at about 5.30 am and did not see Ragoobar in the bedroom they were sharing on an upper floor. Singh observed all the doors were locked but saw that one of the bedroom windows was open, and when she looked out she saw Ragoobar on the ground, approximately 30 feet below.

Singh raised an alarm and she and relatives went outside to help Ragoobar, who was taken to Scarborough General Hospital and later transferred to Port-of-Spain General Hospital where she underwent emergency surgery, and remained in a critical condition at the intensive care unit where doctors said she was brain dead. She died at about 2.10 pm on Wednesday.

Moore said officers of Old Grange Police Station were only informed after Ragoobar was flown to Trinidad and a doctor called to report it. Acting inspector Leander and a team went to the villa and “noted their observations”.

A nurse at the surgical ward of the Scarborough General Hospital had said on Wednesday that Ragoobar was never admitted there but was flown to Trinidad instead and taken to the Port-of-Spain hospital.

Forensic pathologist Dr Valery Alexandrov carried out an autopsy last Thursday and determined “death was due to blunt force cerebral trauma. Death was consistent with the deceased jumping.” Moore commenting on the autopsy results said Ragoobar suffered broken arms, legs and internal injuries causing severe bleeding.

Woman Police Corporal Gordon-Pollard of the Old Grange Police Station is leading the investigation.

Before her sister’s death, Singh had started a social media campaign on Facebook urging friends, family and well-wishers to pray for Ragoobar whom she indicated was suffering from post-partum depression, a state of clinical depression women suffer after giving birth to a baby.

Singh had said the family had mistaken Ragoobar’s depression as grief over the deaths of her grandfather and grandfather-in-law over the past few months.

“We hope that by sharing this post that we are able to make others more aware of post-partum depression and that awareness will save lives,” Singh had said in her post.