A Barrackpore mother is calling on police to step up their efforts to capture a relative who she said tried to kill her and her four young children.
Camille Persad, 28, of Cumuto Road, Barrackpore, visited the T&T Guardian’s South Bureau yesterday with her children, her mother and her husband seeking help.
The latest incident took place on Saturday as she took her children out for a walk at a nearby savannah.
Persad said around 7 pm on Saturday, she was in a savannah near her home with her mother, Beena Bisnath, and her four children, Martina, seven; Moses, five; Aaron, two; and Valentina, six months.
“The children wanted to go for a walk and the savannah is close where we live,” Persad said. “When we reach, I ask my mother to go get some snacks in the parlour for the children and she said ‘okay’.
“When she walk out in the road, the man (name called) see her, stopped his car and told her come in the car and sit down.”
Persad said her mother has always been afraid of the man and refused.
“She tell him no, she don’t want to go and he started cussing. He see me and the children and was pointing at we and then he drive off.”
She said she decided to take the children back home as she, too, had become afraid.
“I take the children and tell my mother let we just go home. When we reach almost in front the gate, I see his car park up in front my house and he was in front the door, cussing and banging on my door with a cutlass.”
Persad said her brother saw the man and ran out of the house through another doorway.
“My brother not so right in the head and when he see the man and run outside... Then the man see all of us standing up in the road and started running us down with the cutlass.”
Persad said she ran a short distance and was able to hide her children in a dark street.
“Martina fall while we was running and get cuts on her hand and arm...he keep running after us and saying he was going to kill all of us.
“I make them children hide in the dark and like he didn’t see us and he pass straight.”
Persad said she called her husband, Anthony, on the phone and Anthony alerted the police.
“The police came and meet us hiding in the dark but the man had already left.”
She says, since then the man has passed by her house several times, hurling threats from his car.
“The police say they can’t find him but right through he passing in front my house and telling we all kind of things. Me and the children afraid to go outside in the yard even.”
She said she was afraid to walk her children to and from school, as the man has threatened to hit her with his car.
“We really need something to be done about this, I can’t even come out my house, how I going to carry my children to school?”
When the T&T Guardian contacted the Barrackpore Police Station yesterday, an officer said the investigating officer in Persad’s case was not on duty. The officer said if the man had committed an arrestable offence, he would have been taken into custody already, but in a case like this, enquiries have to be done before the police could act.