Mother throws baby overboard

Jan 26, 2010 News

An eighteen-day-old baby boy at Weldaad Village West Coast Berbice, had his life snuffed out by his mother early yesterday morning.
The child was reportedly thrown into a trench at around 5 a.m., by his mother, a 30-year-old with a history of mental illness.
The tragic occurrence became known when relatives of the woman named, Alexis Felix, discovered the baby missing around 9 a.m. and questioned her about its whereabouts.
She then took them to the trench about two hundred yards away from her home and showed them where she had thrown the child. She also helped them retrieve the body.
The woman, who has two other children, was yesterday assisting Police with their investigations even as quite a few people were questioning whether many, including Hospital Officials and others, were to be blamed for allowing her custody of an infant, given her long and known history of mental illness.
“She got the baby at New Amsterdam Hospital less than three weeks ago. They must have observed that she was not in her right mind. Why did they allow her to retain custody of the child?” one friend of the relatives asked.
Her father and grandfather of the dead child, Lambert Felix said: “We knew that she had a problem; but she was living in her brother’s home ; she didn’t really want for anything;  we were just hoping that she would get over her illness. I don’t think anybody knew when she left the house with her son yesterday morning.”
Meanwhile, an examination of the birth certificate of the dead child revealed that he had been given the name Alvin Felix and that he had been delivered at the New Amsterdam Hospital at 13.30 hrs on January 7th last.
The section of the birth certificate which should contain particulars of the father did not contain any information whatsoever, but a mere horizontal scratch.
Felix said that his daughter is a fairly well educated person, who was an ex-student of the Mahaicony Secondary School and who achieved passes at the CXC examinations.
He disclosed that she had borne two other children but relatives had taken them away from her because of her illness.
“She started getting mental problems after leaving school. She spent time at the National Psychiatric Hospital in New Amsterdam and has been receiving medication from that Institution from time to time,” he said.
He stated, with obvious regret, that relatives had hesitated in taking custody of this child because the mother was being monitored by her brother and no one suspected that the situation would have taken such a tragic turn.
“I passed by the house and heard the child crying around 4.30 a.m. We didn’t discover that something bad had happened until around 9 a.m. when we saw her coming out of a minibus from the direction of Rosignol, without the baby,” he said.
He showed this newspaper an upturned pail near to the trench on which the mentally disturbed woman had apparently sat for a long while before throwing the child into the trench.
The body of the child is currently at the mortuary of the Fort Wellington Cottage Hospital awaiting a post mortem examination.