Teenager Netanya Mohamdally, who spent several years in a home because of her uncontrollable ways, had started progressing nicely, earned several educational certificates and was just starting to get her life back on track when her life was snuffed out.
But the chance for the 17-year-old to fullfil her promise was suddenly taken away from her by someone police believe may have been very close to her. Officers said yesterday that one of Mohamdally’s male friends holds the key to what happened to her, as she was last seen at his Chase Village, Chaguanas home at about 8 pm on March 17.
Mohamdally’s decomposing body was found in a ravine at Exchange Lots, Couva, by a farmer on Saturday. Both her hands and feet were tied together with rope and her head was also bashed in. An autopsy revealed she died of chop wounds to the neck.
Mohamdally was wearing a pair of short black tights, black vest and tan-coloured slippers when she was found. There was the tattoo of a rose on the right side of her abdomen, which was how her mother positively identified her at the Forensic Science Centre in St James on Monday.
Yesterday, a close family friend, an elderly woman who did not want to give her name, said Mohamdally’s death had “rocked” the area where she lived with her mother in a rented apartment at the corner of Gaston and Xavier Street Extension in Chaguanas.
The woman said she was told by Mohamdally’s mother that she had begged her teen daughter not to go anywhere that day.
“If children would listen to their parents nothing would happen to them. The mother told us she saw when the daughter got dressed and put a bag on her shoulder and was about to leave. That mother begged her not to go anywhere but she still left. She gone and look at…she never came back home alive,” the elderly woman said.
“The police have to find them who did that to her...they tie up that pretty girl and stab her up all in the neck and face. Smashed her head too. What could she have possibly done to deserve such a death like that?” the woman added.
The woman said the teen’s mother did domestic work for a living.
“That mother worked very hard and very honest to pay her rent…she had a hard life raising her daughter and had to put her in this home because she was uncontrollable but the girl end up doing good and got a whole set of certificates and other papers, proving that her behaviour had gotten better.
That mother used to go in the court regular to sign for her. That mother tried her best and got her the job at Pennywise in December.”
The elderly woman said Mohamdally was well loved at her workplace by all her co-workers and was “a favourite among the girls. She was throwing a little small sou-sou hand too as a savings. She was doing good and making everyone proud.”
Asked if she knew whether or not Mohamdally was ever threatened by anyone, the elderly woman replied: “I don’t know but I was to ask the mother to find out if she had gotten her sou-sou hand, but we believe that she was killed in a house or somewhere else and her body dumped there. If you see the area where she body was found in a pond you wouldn’t even want to go there, even if it’s daylight. Thank God for the man who was going in his garden that he spot the body, otherwise we would have not known where to find her.”
