I DIDN’T KILL MY HUSBAND

“I didn’t stab him. He stabbed himself by mistake.”

Speaking publicly for the first time since being released, Selena Khan yesterday sought to set the record straight on the death of her common-law husband Dayanand Dookie.

Khan, 27, was released from custody at 10 pm on Wednesday, after being held for five days as police investigated the death of her husband. She had been in custody since last Friday after Dookie died at Chaguanas Health Centre. An autopsy showed he died from a single stab wound.

Initial reports were that Dookie, 39, was arguing with and beating Khan in the kitchen of their rented Cunupia apartment when she stabbed him in the chest at 5 pm last Friday. Speaking at her mother’s home in Cunupia, Khan denied killing her husband.

“He was vex from the night before because I had asked him to help me hold the baby for me to bathe and he said no. I asked him if that is how he will be when it was I who is doing everything in the house all day long,” Khan said.

“He got vex and went to sleep, and when we wake up on Friday, he kept talking about what I told him, and I told him to just forget it and let’s move on. He went to work and came back at 1.15 pm with a piece of pork to cook and a half bottle of rum...he was already drunk when he reached home.”

Khan said she was accustomed to Dookie’s foul moods and tried her best to do her duty as his wife.

“I was seeing about the baby, I put him down to play and went to start cooking. I had dhal and rice on the stove and he was cutting up the pork. When he finished, I took it from him and put it up to cook. All this time, he was grumbling and cussing and saying I back-answered him the night before,” Khan said.

He had a look on his face, Khan said, which she had never seen before. “There was a friend of his in our home and he (Dookie) started beating me on the couch in front of the guy. The man went outside and I thought Dayanand would have gone to talk to him and leave me. I got up and went in the kitchen but Dayanand followed me inside.”

It was then that nine years of abuse Khan suffered at Dookie’s hands, came to a violent end –for him.

“He grabbed a knife and was hitting me and saying he going to stab me. He tried to stab me and I started to fight back when I realised this time he was really going to try and kill me. He kept trying to pelt a stab at me and when I tried to grab the knife, he pulled his hand back real hard and it (the knife) went in his chest.”

Dookie collapsed and Khan said she tried to stop the bleeding.

“I grabbed a vest from the couch and sat down next to him and was pressing it against the wound to try and stop the bleeding. The last thing he said to me before he started to gasp for breath was that he was sorry,” Khan said.

She added that Dookie’s friend contacted an ambulance and she stayed by his side, applying pressure to the wound until the ambulance arrived.

“Even when the police came and told me I had to get up from next to him, and I said no, I am not leaving him until the ambulance comes.”

Khan remained in police custody during Dookie’s funeral on Wednesday. “It really hurt me to know that I went through so much with him and we were together for nine years and his family just took his body and conducted the funeral. No one ever asked me anything,” she said.

The challenge she faces now, she said, is to provide for her children, as Dookie’s relatives have taken possession of his maxi taxi and refused to hand it over to her. “I want to know now that even though we were not married, that my children still have their rights to what belonged to their father. They need their due and as bad as Dayanand was, I know he wouldn’t want his children to suffer,” she said.