By Sara Bharrat
Former Superintendent of Police Rambarran believes that the two men who attacked him at his Waterloo Street, Georgetown home on Saturday “left him for dead” on his living room floor.
Just after 5.15 pm, Rambarran (only name), 82, was lying in bed when a male started to call out for him. His buzzer, he recalled, went off thrice and he shouted to the visitors that he would attend to them.
Rambarran lives alone in the upper flat of his Waterloo Street home. During the day, he explained, a woman worked with him for several hours. When the men came his employee had already left for the day. The woman, he said, has been working for him for just over a week.
“I am a sick man,” Rambarran told Stabroek News from his bed yesterday, “and I can’t walk without the help of my roller (walker) so it took me a lil time to get to the door.”
Two men were at the door and they identified themselves as delivery agents from Laparkan. They told Rambarran that they had a package for him from his daughter, Rani, and that there was a second parcel on the road.
“I peep out the side window and see that they had a box and so I open the door,” Rambarran recounted, “and after I open the door one of the men left and said he had a second parcel on the road to bring in.”
After the second man left, Rambarran said, he started to chit-chat with the other. He was still talking to the man more than 15 minutes later, he recalled, and still the other had not returned. It was around this time that the man asked him for some water. Rambarran told him that there was no drinking water in the house but the man insisted that he would drink from the pipe at the sink.
Rambarran eventually gave the man leave to enter his kitchen to get himself a drink of water. Shortly after this, Rambarran recalled, he was attacked from behind by the man who tried to wrap a cord used to hang window curtains around his neck.
“He couldn’t handle me by himself and he kept struggling to wrap this thing around my neck and is some time during this that the other one came back,” Rambarran recalled. “Is my own kitchen knife one of them pick up and slash me with.”
The man was slashed to the neck (just under the chin), just above the forehead and he was stabbed to the right side shoulder. Rambarran does not remember which wound he sustained first but remembers bleeding and beginning to feel weak. “I know I was going to faint,” the man said, “but I wasn’t going to stop fighting…I fight them until I pass out.”
When he regained consciousness, Rambarran said, there was blood streaming fast over his head and down his chest. For a few seconds, before he realized that he was bleeding, Rambarran said he had thought the men had thrown water on him. It was in this state that he started to shout to his next door neighbours who eventually made their way over.
“The same day they [his neighbours] had a birthday party and they were playing music so it wasn’t easy for them to hear me…when one of them finally come out she took one look at the blood on me and started to shout for her husband,” Rambarran said.
Before he was taken to the hospital, the man said, he checked under his mattress where he’d put $200,000 in rent money he’d collected on Friday. The money was gone but the room, Rambarran said, was not ransacked. It was as if the men knew right where to find the cash.
It was the couple who took him to the Georgetown Public Hospital where he was treated immediately. Rambarran was released from the medical institution and is currently at home resting.
“When I got to the hospital I hear them asking if I was dead but I wasn’t dead. I was hearing them. I was right there and I was alive,” Rambarran said.
Rambarran has three children and they all reside abroad. On August 5, the man said, he returned to Guyana from New York where he had been staying with his daughter. “I don’t like it there…I like my home and I am not really afraid to be here alone…I think that those men thought I was dead when they left me on my living room floor…well they took the money…I have no money at home now,” Rambarran said.
