Guyanese women sometimes end up in cold, dark, shallow places, where earthworms whisper and maggots’ feast. There is often no box to cover them for burial services are not conducted by those who murder then place them two feet deep. Those shallow graves are haunted places even long after they have been discovered. They are memorials of screams silenced forever and scars that never healed. And the alleged or confirmed perpetrators of such brutal acts sometimes escape and efforts to find them cease.
It was just over a year ago when Shonette Dover was discovered in a shallow grave in Linden. At just 20 years old, her life was ended allegedly by her boyfriend. The suspect, Shaquawn Alleyne, has not been apprehended and there were reports that he left the country. The silence around the case is deafening as there seems to have been little or no action to apprehend him since the shock and outrage in the days and weeks immediately after her decomposed body was found.
