Woman, sisters want relief from sex-predator relative

DESPERATE to save her sisters from being raped and impregnated by a close male relative – as she was – a San Fernando woman is begging police for help.

The woman, who will not be identified for her own safety, told Newsday the man began raping her when she turned eight. Now, she says, he has started interfering with her younger sisters and although she has called police for him on several occasions, he has never been arrested.

The woman, now 29, says her years of terror stopped when she fled the home at 17, leaving behind her mother and five younger sisters.

With no one to turn to, she survived on the kindness of neighbours, who gave her scraps of wood and ply board to build a one-room house close to her mother’s.

She did odd jobs and admitted to making wrong choices, but said she now makes time to go to church and talk about the trauma she has experienced.

“I had three abortions for him, when I was 13, 14 and 15, and today I want a baby and can’t have one.

“You think I really want my sisters to go through that? My life is over, but they are real bright and could make something, they could be somebody,” she said.

“Right now they have a head start, ‘cause he start on me when I was eight. They are 15 and he now starting with them.”

Over the last two years, her one-room home has become a place of refuge for her younger sisters and her mother.

“He put out my mother two years ago and she was outside with everything by the road, she didn’t have nowhere to go, and I say ,I not letting my mother go through that. So I tell her come stay with me,” she said.

But her younger sisters were left behind and soon began to beg for her help.

“They say in the middle of the night he used to come in their room and touch them up. They started sprinkling powder around their bed just so they could see the footprints in the morning.”

Eventually all the girls began living with her and they built additional rooms onto the tiny house to accommodate them. But their lives have not improved.

“About 3 o’clock Thursday morning, I was sleeping on a mattress on the ground and my sister was sleeping on the bed when I woke up to pee and I see him lying down facing my sister with he boxers alone on.”

She raised the alarm and the man jumped up, pushed her down and fled through a window in another bedroom.

He hid in the bushes for some time before coming out and talking to police, who warned him to “behave.”

“He told them, ‘Yuh know how them woman does get on,’ and laughed and they left.”

She said he then threatened to kill all of them.

“He was walking up in the yard with a cutlass in his hand and saying he will kill all of us. We call the police again, and when they came back, they said we should go inside and stay there.”

She said police told her there was nothing they could do, as they had not found the man in her yard when they came.

Yesterday, with her two teenage sisters in tow, she made a request for a protection order through a justice of the peace.

In the statement given by one of the 15-year-old victims to the justice of the peace, the child reported that the man touched her inappropriately and threatened to kill her.

“They say I have to go back tomorrow and pay to file it and then wait eight days for him to get served. In that eight days, anything could happen to us in here. We have no one to turn to, and every time we call the police and nothing is done, we feel so hopeless.”