Stanislaus Gomes, the victim of a deadly cutlass attack by his drug-addicted son on Thursday, was alive until the young man severed his head.

Stanislaus Gomes

A post-mortem examination conducted on Gomes’s body yesterday by Govern-ment Pathologist Dr Nehaul Singh listed the cause of death as decapitation. Gomes had already suffered several chop wounds about the body by the time the fatal wound was delivered.

The 24-year-old suspect is in police custody and is expected to be charged shortly.
Relatives told Stabroek News yesterday that the suspect, 24, is at the Brickdam Police Station lockups and no one is interested in seeing him at this moment.

Gomes, 57, of Waiakabra, Linden-Soesdyke Highway, succumbed to his injuries just outside his home. In a statement, police said that the incident occurred around 9 am and was sparked by Gomes’s refusal to fulfil a request for $200, which was made by his son. “It is reported that the son then inflicted several chops with a cutlass to the body of Stanislaus Gomes, severing his head in the process,” the police said.

Gomes and the suspect, his only child, lived on a large plot of land about a ten-minute drive from the highway, through a number of trails. There, Gomes cultivated eddoes and cash crops which he sold to earn his income. Gomes had often complained to relatives that the young man would sometimes be unwilling to help him. The young man was said to have been using drugs since his teenage years and in addition to marijuana would “smoke whatever he could get his hands on.”