Mother cries for Leisha

Relatives try to console Tara Ramnath as she weeps while sitting next to her daughter Leisha's coffin at her funeral in Penal, yesterday.
Relatives try to console Tara Ramnath as she weeps while sitting next to her daughter Leisha's coffin at her funeral in Penal, yesterday.

UNABLE to walk, 71-year-old Tara Ramnath wheeled towards the coffin bearing the body of her daughter, Leisha, who was brutally beaten then strangled last Saturday night.

Relatives looked on at the grim sight at Leisha's funeral at her family's home in Penal, yesterday, as a distraught Tara immediately broke down in tears the moment she looked into the coffin.

Tara then turned away and held on to the arms of a relative standing behind her. She began wailing and crying loudly, “God no, God no!”

Other relatives tried to console her but she continued weeping as she sat by her daughter’s coffin throughout the funeral.

Relatives said Leisha, 40, took care of her mother who was confined to a wheelchair after she lost both legs to diabetes.

Tara Ramnath mother of Leisha Ramnath is surrounded by relatives as she mourns for her daughter during Leisha's funeral in Penal, yesterday.

The two shared a close bond, relatives said, and Tara had often warned her daughter to leave the man they believe brutally beat and killed her.

Delivering the eulogy, Ramnath’s cousin Premaytie Roopchan called on relatives and friends to remain at Ramnath’s side.

“Leisha was her only daughter. The daughter she depended on for help. She was always there with her mother. Please please don’t neglect Tara.”

Roopchan said Ramnath also had a son who also assisted his mother but, "Now, more than ever, she needs the strength to keep fighting, to keep living. She is hurting so much.”

Relatives said that, for three years, Leisha had been in an abusive relationship in which the man had repeatedly threatened to kill her, her mother and her brother who lives downstairs in the same house. A few months ago, they said, the abusive man, now a suspect in Leisha's murder, secured a piece of cloth saying it was to hang her.

On Thursday night police arrested the suspect who was found hiding at a house in central Trinidad. He is being questioned. Homicide Region Three Police are investigating.

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