As a US-based Guyanese and his girlfriend sat outside a Princes Street yard on Monday night having burgers and fries, they were attacked by two robbers.
Ray Williams, 49, and his girlfriend, 22, who did not want her name published, were hauled from a rented motor car shortly after 9pm. The couple was then ordered to lie face down in the grass by one of the attackers, who were armed with a pistol. The robbers took the car, a cellular phone, jewelry and a suitcase with other articles and then made good their escape. “Even now I am still terrified and more so I am angry at how I was treated by the police,” the woman told Stabroek News last night from her home.
Williams, she said, returned to the US early yesterday morning. Her boy-friend, she explained, had been in the country visiting for just over a week and usually visited three to four times. The man, according to her, had only been at the Princes Street location with her twice and she could not saywhether the attackers had tracked them. “We went to JR last night (Monday) and get something to eat… we were hanging out because it was his last night here,” she recalled. “It was while liming in front the Princes Street yard that I first saw these two men walking to us from Halley Street.”
The two men, she said, walked by her and Williams and then stood behind them for a very short time talking. Before she could completely warn her boyfriend about this suspicious behavior, the men were upon them. “My boy-friend try to drive off in the car but one of the men haul me out and then haul he out and all I hear the one with the gun tell me is to lie down in the f@#*$€¥ grass,” she recalled.
The attackers, she further recalled, were wearing “flop hats” pulled low over their faces. “After they tell me to put my head down in the grass, I did that because these men looked trigger happy,” she said.
One of the men then stripped Williams of a gold band, a cellular phone and his wallet. His wallet, according to his girlfriend, contained US$6 and his credit cards. “He had the rest of his cash and so in his pocket…he was also wearing a gold chain and a gold watch but they didn’t take those. The street is usually busy and like they saw headlights and thought a bus was coming out way, so they took what they got and jumped in the car and drove off,” she said.
The ordeal, she said, lasted for about five minutes. After the incident, the woman said that she borrowed a neighbor’s phone and informed the police. “We called 911 twice and the second time we got a response and the woman told me, ‘Ma’am I am sorry but we don’t have any ranks to send at the moment.’ Can you believe that?” she said.
Williams was eventually successful in contacting a police station but no ranks ever visited the scene. His girlfriend related that they eventually made their way to the Alberttown Police Station to report the matter. “When we got to the police station now,” the man’s girlfriend said, “a police woman there told me how they should lock me up because she heard that I was in the car when the robbery happened and that I know about it. I don’t know what this woman was going on about when the robbers came on foot and it was me and my boyfriend who were in the car. Later, when I talked to the officer-in-charge of that station, he told me that she had no right to speak to me that way. I was already traumatized and there was the police woman further traumatizing me.”
Police, she further noted, had not visited the scene of the robbery up to late last night to conduct an investigation.
In a press release issued last evening, police said that they were investigating the matter. The stolen car, according to police, was recovered several hours after the incident at St. Phillips Green, Georgetown. It had been stripped of several parts.
Williams’ girlfriend stress-ed that had police responded to their call for help immediately, they may have been able to catch the perpetrators. The woman said Williams had told police that the vehicle was low on gas and that the men would not be able to get very far. The car, according to her, was discovered a short distance away in the vicinity of Smyth Street.
Her boyfriend, she further explained, would normally rent the vehicle from one of his friends here. Williams has since committed to standing the cost for the repair of the rented vehicle. “I am very, very upset about this whole thing. I am not satisfied with how the police treated this whole thing. Imagine they didn’t even come to the scene to see if they could get evidence or additional information from anyone who may have seen the men before I did or anything,” she stated.
