Doctors have found that the daughter of Indira Singh, the woman whose decomposed body was found last month in a house they shared at Vergenoegen, on the East Bank Essequibo, is an adult and not a 14-year-old as had been previously believed.
Head of the Child Care & Protection Agency (CC&PA) Ann Greene told the Sunday Stabroek that after she was seen by doctors at the West Demerara Hospital, it was determined that the female is an adult believed to be in her late teens or early twenties.
“This makes it more difficult for us to find accommodation for her but we are working to find a suitable place for her,” Greene said recently. She added it would have been difficult to place her from the inception because of her mental illness but now that it has been ruled that she is an adult, she cannot be placed among children.
The young woman had been in the hospital since her mother’s body was found. While it was suspected that her mother was raped and murdered by an intruder, the results of a post-mortem examination were inconclusive because of the advanced decomposition of the body.
Singh had been dead for days before her body was discovered. A friend, who decided to check on her after not seeing her for days, led police to the discovery.
Singh’s mentally ill daughter never attended school, according to Vergenoegen residents. She had no close relatives and Greene said no one had come forward to offer to care for her.
Singh, said to be about 44, walked the streets with her daughter begging. She occasionally did domestic work for persons in the community. She also received assistance from the Muslim community.
Meanwhile, Greene said that her agency is still seeking to help the son of the late widow of shot policeman Richard Faikall. The five-year-old and his mother, Padmawattie Faikall, are a daily fixture at the Anna Regina car park, where the woman begs for money. The boy, Joshua Singh, has never been enrolled in school. Greene said the CC&PA is not keen on taking the child but they are trying to find a way of ensuring he goes to school. His mother had told this newspaper that she would not send him to school. The woman is mentally ill but she is fiercely protective of the child, after her other children, which she had borne for Faikall, were taken away from her after his death. She apparently never recovered from the trauma of the man’s death.
Greene had said that the woman’s now grown children had lived in state care until they became adults and they are now on their own. The woman’s is in need of assistance and observers have noted that she should be given some medical treatment for her mental state.
Several attempts by this newspaper to ascertain from the Guyana Police Force (GPF) what sort of assistance the woman had received from the force proved futile. GPF Public Relations Officer Ivelaw Whittaker indicated that a request for the information from the force’s administration had not been successful.
Police Sergeant Richard Faikall was gunned down in 1997 by bandits who had robbed the then Guyana National Cooperative Bank (GNCB) at Anna Regina.
