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May 29, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
I was opening my gate to drive into the yard. I got a call from Dale Andrews of this newspaper telling me that Dr. Doobay’s wife had just been killed. I was shocked and expressed loud disbelief to Dale.
My wife and mother-in-law were in the vehicle. My wife asked in anxiety what had happened to Dale. When we drove in, I told her that it wasn’t Dale that was in problems but it was Dale who was on the line.
Dale didn’t know that I knew Mrs. Doobay. He is only aware that I know her husband. This is because I had asked Dr. Doobay to investigate the heart condition Dale has been experiencing lately.
It has been years since I had seen Sharanie Doobay, but I will always remember her as a pleasant woman with a huge sense of humour. One day, she called me aside and began to tell me about a scandal. She looked around to see if people were watching and began to speak so softly that I couldn’t hear what she was telling me.
She said a certain powerful PPP king (she named him) has kept empty one of the apartments in the Echilibar Villas for two years for his woman who was in a foreign land. She told me the cleaner came often and so did the gardener. This was in the early nineties before President Cheddi Jagan had died.
Her point was that the space was needed, but this man was using his position to keep the apartment. She nonchalantly warned me with the words; “You didn’t hear it from me.”
I later checked on what she told me and it was indeed true. This was in the early days, when the corruption monster hadn’t escape from the laboratory.
One of the funniest memories I have of Mrs. Doobay occurred inside the fast food restaurant, Popeye’s. She pulled off a joke at my expense and had a large laugh at my embarrassment.
I walked into Popeye’s and she was at the counter with a woman of her age. We began to chat and then she pointed to her friend and asked me if I knew her. I said I didn’t.
Smiling wickedly, she said; “Do you know who this woman is? Then she told me. She was the wife of the owner of Hacks’ Halaal Restaurant on Commerce Street.
So what was funny about that? The week before, I had penned a letter in the press chastising the restaurant’s ownership for refusing to sell local fruit juices. I was dining there and when I asked for the local item, one of the owner’s sons told me only canned juice from Trinidad was offered.
As the lady began to talk to me, Mrs. Doobay was quite amused. She was laughing broadly. She knew she had pulled one on me. That was the last time I saw Sharanie Doobay.
Last month at the Georgetown Public Hospital, I asked Dr. Doobay how she was doing, and he told me that he was late for home and she is there waiting for him.
Some things in this homicide do not seem right. Why did the police allow other persons to perambulate the crime scene? No one should have entered the home except police personnel.
I read that a school of governmental officials, including Drs. Roger Luncheon and Leslie Ramsammy, descended on the crime scene. Secondly, I am surprised that the jurisdiction of the house was handed back to Dr. Doobay two days later.
I guess that made sense because Guyana does not have a functional forensic lab. Even if the police had kept the house off-limits to non-security personnel – including the family of Mrs. Doobay – what purpose would it have served when DNA and other samples if taken would take years to be tested?
Will Sharanie Doobay become another statistic? No one was ever arrested for the brutal murder of the warden of the Beharry Dormitory at the University of Guyana.
He was shot in his car and the vehicle set alight with him inside on the seawall outside the GT&T offices.
No suspect was identified for the designer of the Caricom Secretariat who was gunned down at one of his work sites. There were no signs of robbery.
An employee of Citizens Bank, who was also a football official, was shot to death one evening in his car on the seawall.
The adopted brother of the editor of this newspaper, Adam Harris, was killed on the Kingston seawall. There are a few dozen more statistics, I haven’t mentioned.
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