Alana Farley’s left jaw is now swollen to about the size of a mango—the result, she says, of being pummeled by her ex-boyfriend, a police officer, through the streets of Bartica on Sunday evening.
Farley, 19, says she was dragged down Golden Beach along Third Avenue just around 9pm by a traffic rank stationed at the Bartica Police Station, who allegedly slapped and cuffed her about her body, hours after she told him that their relationship was over.
“I don’t care if he is a police. I want he get charge because look he working and I can’t go to work because me face swell up and I feel pain all over me body,” she told Stabroek News yesterday.
According to Farley, around 5:30pm on Sunday, the young man visited the home she shares with her mother and she ended their relationship. The young man did not respond and she left him at the house and visited her aunt, before proceeding to the beach.
Just after 8:30pm, she said, the young man came to the beach and saw her in the company of another man. “Just so he come up to me and grab me and drag me down the beach to a lonely spot and start slapping up and asking me why I am embarrassing he,” she recounted, adding that she was dragged to the corner of the road and cuffed several times to the face and other parts of her body. During the assault, the man allegedly threatened “to kill me and juk me up,” she said, and he ripped off the gold chain she was wearing at the time and one of her earrings was also dislodged.
Farley said she tried to run away but the man followed and held on to her until a taxi driver that she knew pulled him away at the corner of Fourth Avenue. It was while the taxi driver was speaking to the policeman that she fled to the home of her aunt, who immediately took her to the police station to lodge a report and later to the hospital for a medical certificate. They returned to the station yesterday and met with the station sergeant, who asked her how far she wanted to go with the case. “I tell he, ‘As far as possible,’” she added, saying that she is not afraid of the man and wants him to be charged and face the consequences of his actions.
At the station, there was a confrontation between Farley and her ex-boyfriend, who went dressed in his uniform and he was taken into the room she was in with her aunt. He requested that her aunt leave. However, the sergeant said he could not make that decision and Farley said she preferred that her aunt remain and the two then gave statements, in which the man allegedly admitted that she sustained her injuries during a struggle they had.
The young woman was upset that the sergeant informed her that he could not charge his colleague until he made contact with his superiors in Georgetown, since he is a police officer and not a civilian. The sergeant called Farley later yesterday and indicated that the young man she was with when the assault first started and the taxi driver who rescued her need to give statements or no charge can be instituted. However, she said, the young man from the beach has since gone into the interior, while the taxi driver has stopped speaking to her and she pleaded with the station sergeant to invite him into the station to make the statement.
According to Farley, it was not the first time her now ex-boyfriend hit her. “The first time [it was] just a slap but now is this and he have to get charge,” she was adamant.
She explained that the two had a good relationship until the rank was transferred to Lethem. “When he get transfer he never use to call really and whenever he call was just to cuss up and all dem things…and when he come back I tell he things change,” she said.
The policeman only returned to Bartica two Sundays ago and although she repeatedly told him that their relationship had changed, he ignored her statements. “It is only last night [Sunday night] I really tell he that it is over,” she said
Meanwhile, the woman’s aunt, Ava Abrams, also called for swift justice for her niece and said that they would not rest until the man faces the courts. “If you see her face how it is swollen and her foot also swell and she said she in pain,” Abrams said, adding that Farley never told anyone when the young man hit her the first time because if she did, he would not have gotten a second opportunity to do it again. “He is a man of the law and should know better and the police must charge him,” she added.
