Sascha Wil­son

A Ch­agua­nas moth­er re­called how she cra­dled her un­con­scious ba­by in her arms and ran fran­ti­cal­ly in the mid­dle of the night for help to the po­lice sta­tion al­most half a mile away.By the time an am­bu­lance got to the po­lice sta­tion 30 min­utes lat­er, and then took the ba­by to the hos­pi­tal, he was dead.An au­top­sy on six-month-old Christo­pher Ramb­hal re­vealed he died from po­si­tion­al as­phyx­ia.He choked while be­ing breast­fed by his moth­er, Neisha Wat­t­ley, who had fall­en asleep.

A tear­ful Wat­t­ley, 24, and her hus­band, Kris Ramb­hal, 25 (they have three oth­er chil­dren, ages sev­en, three and two) re­count­ed the trau­mat­ic in­ci­dent to min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment, Ver­nel­la Al­leyne-Top­pin, who vis­it­ed the cou­ple's Per­se­ver­ance Vil­lage, Ch­agua­nas, home yes­ter­day to of­fer con­do­lences.Al­leyne-Top­pin promised help with gov­ern­ment hous­ing or a lot of land through the Land for the Land­less pro­gramme, and help with start­ing their own busi­ness.

For al­most two years, the cou­ple, both mar­ket ven­dors, have been liv­ing in a small, win­dow­less shack, with no wa­ter or elec­tric­i­ty, in a busy area off the main road near the riv­er bank.They left their pre­vi­ous home af­ter a fam­i­ly dis­pute.Wat­t­ley re­called, "The night the in­ci­dent hap­pen (June 14), I was sleep­ing, my son woke up around 9 (pm), he start­ed to cry, I turn to my side, I lift him up and I rest him on my arm here, next to the breast here and I knock back out. I didn't have a clue of what hap­pen or when it hap­pen.

"My hus­band, he then wake and he said Neisha, Neisha, I don't think he alive you know, he bel­ly not mov­ing. And with that, I just dive off the bed, run out­side, I turn his head over and I blow in­to his mouth to see if I could bring him back, but I just saw is like milk flow­ing through his nose and I just wipe it, run back in­side, get a blan­ket and I run straight to the sta­tion."I start­ed to bawl and scream."She said the po­lice of­fi­cers on du­ty that night were nice to her, but the am­bu­lance took too long to get to the sta­tion.

With the sup­port of her hus­band, she said, she was try­ing to move on.