Sascha Wilson
Dominic Gokool choked to death on mud and soil, according to an autopsy.
Gokool’s decomposing body was discovered partially sunken in a mud volcano in the Irois Forest in Chatham two Thursdays ago.
He was reported missing on January 13.
Gokool’s mother Denise Alexander, went yesterday to the Forensic Science Centre for the autopsy.
Alexander told Guardian Media that her son’s cause of death was listed as asphyxia due to choking, due to mud and soil in his respiratory tract.
She said due to advanced decomposition of the body, it was not determined whether there were external injuries.
However, Alexander believes her son was lured to his death by a person or persons he knew.
“He was following the wrong friends. He used to smoke marijuana. I was studying whatever happened (to him) maybe concern drugs coming in on that side or it had something (to do with his death),” she said.
Alexander, a single mother, said her son grew up in East Dry River, Port-of-Spain, but moved to south Trinidad more than two years ago because a warrant was out for his arrest for a larceny incident.
However, she said her son, a market vendor, used to visit her in Port-of-Spain.
She last saw him a few months ago and spoke to him on December 27.
Alexander said Gokool’s girlfriend told his aunt that he left a message that he was “going to handle something in the morning” and of he didn’t return to make a report at the police station.
Gokool also left instructions for her to give the police a particular name. Alexander said someone who knew him claimed Gokool went to “scrape coconut and orange.”
Alexander said she tried her best with her son.
“I wonder if there was more I could have done to keep him on the straight and narrow. It is not easy. You make children and not their minds. The friends they want to be around and all that is how they get themselves in trouble,” she said.
Noting that children behave a certain way at home and another way at school, she advised parents to “pop in” in school and observe their children’s behaviour.
“It is sad, he is my first son. Some might say it was inevitable. He never used to take advice, you talk to him he never used to listen,” she lamented.
Gokool was living in a forested area in Chatham, police said.
The Hunters Search and Rescue Team and police officers searched for him after he was reported missing.
A report stated that around 1 pm on January 26, Sgt Khan and South Western Division Task Force officers were patrolling the Chatham area when they got information from an anonymous source of several bodies seen near a mud volcano in Chatham.
The officers trekked three miles west of Chatham Beach then came upon a dirt road that led them 500 meters into the forest to the volcano. Investigations are continuing.
