Letter T attackers knew about victim’s gun

The bandits who murdered the caretaker of the Letter T estate on Tuesday knew he had a shotgun and asked for it after they had already fatally shot him.

Muneshwar Pargass
Muneshwar Pargass

They also denounced Muneshwar Pargass in the presence of his shocked and terrified wife.

“Your husband is not a good person,” were the words of one of the bandits who burst into the bedroom of Shrimattie Pargass minutes after they had shot and killed her husband.

“I don’t know how somebody could say my husband is not a good man, he was the best, very loving, we never had any problem, he never hit me or anything. He loved his children, I am just trying to be strong for my children,” the grieving mother of two said yesterday.

Her husband, the caretaker of the Letter T, Mahaicony coconut estate was shot and killed during a raid by three gun and cutlass-wielding men minutes after he had opened his door on hearing his dogs barking.

Speaking to Stabroek News via phone yesterday the woman said that she was putting their 15-month-old son to sleep in the bedroom while her husband was watching television in the living room. She said she heard the dogs barking “in a way they don’t usual bark and I tell he somebody outside go and see is who.”

She said seconds after she heard him open the door she heard a single gunshot and she sprang off the bed and bolted the bedroom door even as she heard her husband shouting “Ow Nadia,” calling her by her popular name. “That was his last words and I could hear he was in pain but I didn’t know he dead.”

“They come and ramming the door and I decide to open it because I was thinking about me husband and when I open it two men with gun come in…”  She said while the men were in the room one of them addressed another person outside and told them to keep her husband downstairs. “I don’t know if dem was trying to smart me or what but it was like he did still alive.”

She said the man demanded cash and she told them where it was and they also asked for jewellery and she gave them.

The woman said the men took her and her husband’s marriage rings which they weren’t wearing at the time.  The woman said contrary to the police release which stated that the men took $30,000, she is not sure of the amount of money the men took as her husband would “put in and tek out money.”  The bandits even took the money out of her daughter’s savings tin. “It was just twenty dollars, I don’t know how much was there but I does wait till it full then carry it to the bank to bank it for her and dem tek dat too.”

The men then asked for her husband’s gun, a 12-gauge shotgun. “Is like dem know we had a gun because dem ask for it and I tell dem it in de case and I don’t have the keys.”

The woman said she told the men that her husband had the keys and she should ask him but instead they took a cutlass and broke the lock on the case before escaping with the shotgun.

According to the women the men then tied her hands behind her back and tied her mouth.

All of this was done in the presence of her little son who was on the bed at the time. “Dem tell me to count to a hundred before untying myself and I count to a hundred and then loose the rope.” She said when she went to the door she saw her husband lying at the bottom of the stairs with a wound and he appeared not to be breathing. But instead of going to her husband the woman said she went back into the house as she was not sure if the bandits had gone. She then contacted relatives and later the police.

“I don’t know how I will live through this. It is just on December twentieth last year that I renew my vows. He was a good husband,” the woman said.

Meanwhile, up to late yesterday afternoon the police had not arrested anyone for the murder.