No closure for family of missing 11-year-old

More than three years after 11-year-old Nordex Wilkin-son went missing family members are still waiting for closure, since even though they are almost sure she is dead they want confirmation of this so they can move on with their lives.

The child’s aunt, Evette Chung, recently told Stabroek News that since 2004 they had heard nothing from the police on the case and there were still many unanswered questions. The child disappeared some time in late 2003 when she was just 11 years old. She would be 15 years in November.

Her mother and other relatives only learnt that Nordex had disappeared on May 18, 2004, when her younger sister Keasha Simmons ran away from the Enterprise Primary School, D’Urban Backlands. She took a minibus to her aunt’s home in Philadelphia, East Bank Essequibo and related to her what she knew about the disappearance. She had been living with her grandmother at the time.

Chung told Stabroek News that she was amazed that the police had not issued any wanted bulletin for the child’s father, who was suspected of having killed her. The man was said to be living in Suriname and Chung said that it was very disappointing that none of his relatives had ever made contact with them in relation to the child’s disappearance.

At the time Nordex disappeared she was living in Pattenson, Turkeyen, with her two younger sisters – Keasha and another sister who was physically handicapped. After the child’s disappearance, Keasha had said she had been taken out of the school they attended, Redeemer Primary in Campbellville, and sent to the Sophia Primary School.

Keahsa had said that she saw her older sister being taken out of the family home by her father in September of 2003 after both had been severely beaten simply for frying an egg.

She said her sister had had to be lifted out of the home days after she received the thrashing because she could not walk. She said that on the night she last saw Nordex her father picked her up and took her out of the home in her pink nightgown. “When daddy come back and he rap and I ask who it is and he tell me it was he, I open the door and when I ask he whey Nordex deh he tell me that she gone outside. He tell me if anybody ask for Nordex tell them she gone away.”

She had said that her father clipped Nordex’s throat with scissors and she could not walk after the beating. Keasha was forced to take care of her, and her condition deteriorated.

A relative of the father had reported seeing the children after they were beaten and confirmed that Nordex had an injury to the throat.

Following the report the police dug up the backyard at the Pattensen, Turkeyen home, but did not find anything suspicious. They did this after the child reported that she suspected that her sister was buried in the backyard because a few days after her disappearance she started smelling something.

The children’s mother, Nudia Wilkinson, in 2001 had taken the two children along with their handicapped sister to Yarrowkabra on the Linden/Soesdyke Highway to their grandmother, who later handed over the children to the father. Nudia had claimed that she had suffered years of abuse at the hands of the children’s father and was unable to take care of them. After the disappearance of Nordex her father had taken the handicapped child to the Philadelphia home of her aunt on a night when the aunt was not at home.

Today both Keisha and that child are living with their mother in Bartica. Chung said that the children’s mother has become very sickly since her daughter’s disappearance and her siblings now have to assist in maintaining her and her family. She said that the child’s grandmother had since passed away and it was very sad that she had died without knowing what had become of her granddaughter. It is two years since the woman died. “Sometimes I feel she took it on and died,” Evette told Stabroek News. She feels that the man’s family knows where he is and should inform the police who should then question him, as he must know what happened to Nordex. She pointed out that it was highly unlikely that Nordex was alive, because if she were her father would have ensured that she at least contact them so as to clear his name.

“We are praying and hoping that one day we would know what happen to Nordex, that is all we want, closure,” Chung said. Keahsa now attends Bartica Secondary School and is in Form One, but would from time to time talk about her sister.