A Bath Housing Scheme, West Coast Berbice mother is seeking answers as to how her 17-year-old son died on Tuesday night after scaling a fence at the Fort Wellington Hospital where he had been admitted for his asthmatic condition.
There are reports that the boy, Damian Kawall, scaled the eight-feet fence in a bid to escape from the institution and fell and badly hurt himself. He was admitted at 7 am the previous day after he “took in with fever and shortness of breath.”
But his mother, Lorna Singh, 39, is finding it hard to believe that he could have hurt himself to that extent. She said that his neck appeared to be broken, his face was swollen and there were huge “black and blue marks” about his body.
Sources told this newspaper that after the boy escaped, police who were on patrol saw him “crawling out of the street and they stopped and questioned him.”
Reports are that the boy “tried to get away through the back entrance of the hospital earlier but the nurses stopped him and sent him back in the ward. When they turned their backs he ran away but the nurses don’t know what happened to him.”
Persons said too that the guard heard the commotion on the road and informed the nurses.
They then sent her to “check if the boy was wearing a white jersey” and to inform the police that he was a patient at the hospital.”
Stabroek News was also told that when the nurses got to the scene they found the boy sitting on the road, breathing loudly. Before they could have taken him back into the ward he collapsed and died. But Singh wants to know if that was what actually transpired, who could explain how her son’s neck could have been broken.
Singh said that on Monday her son, an attendant at Jumbo Jet Stables was in the ward with other persons but they were later discharged. During the afternoon visit the following day he told her he did not want to stay there on his own.
She encouraged him to stay and take his medication and told him he would be alright. She kissed him before she left and promised to return the next morning to see him. She also “put $200 credit in his phone” after he asked her to.
Around 11:30 pm she received a call from the hospital “that he behaving bad and want to go home.” The nurses also told her that he was trying to scale the fence and she questioned “how he would do that when he was so sick.”
She was shocked when 15 minutes later she received another call that he was dead. The woman said “transportation was hard to get because of the soiree at Hopetown.”
Ran from Bath
Her husband, Bruce Singh and another relative then ran from Bath to the hospital about one mile away and found him “lying face down on a trolley…”
She got there around 12:15 am and waited until 4 am for a porter to come to move the body to the Anthony’s Funeral Home next to the hospital.
Singh said that upon seeing her son she started to scream and told the nurses “that was not the way I left my son” and questioned, “What happened to my son?”
She also recalled that the security guard on duty told her relatives that they “missed the scene” earlier, referring to when her son was on the road with the police officers.
According to the woman, on Wednesday her relatives from Georgetown advised her to take the body to the Sandy’s Funeral Home.
It was there that they discovered that the neck was broken and noticed marks mostly on the back, chest and under his arm when they took off his shirt.
“When I held him his neck was moving freely from side to side and the porters even asked why we didn’t check we dead…”
The following day the body was taken to the Georgetown Public Hospital for a post-mortem examination to be performed.
However after the condition of the body was observed relatives were told that “it could not be done because it is a police matter.”
Stabroek News learnt that on Friday a policeman from the Fort Wellington Station then travelled to Georgetown with a hearse from Anthony’s Funeral Home and accompanied the body back to Berbice.
Meanwhile, the woman said when she went into the hospital for her son’s belongings they were “scattered all over, his phone was opened up and there was no credit in it.”
Persons also said that only one guard is assigned to the hospital [front gate] and that if there were more the situation could have been avoided.
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