Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

A 50-year-old Debe fa­ther was de­tained by po­lice af­ter he re­port­ed­ly left his three-year-old daugh­ter alone in a car in a base­ment carpark in La Ro­main.

Ini­tial re­ports stat­ed that act­ing ASP Roland Ram­lo­gan ar­rived at the carpark of a shop­ping es­tab­lish­ment around 3.30 pm Sun­day in his pri­vate ca­pac­i­ty, and heard the child scream­ing and cry­ing.

He ap­proached a Nis­san AD wag­on with the win­dows halfway down and saw the child in the back seat cry­ing un­con­trol­lably. He con­tact­ed the South­ern Di­vi­sion Con­trol Room and re­quest­ed as­sis­tance. The se­nior of­fi­cer then in­struct­ed a fe­male se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cer to take the child out of the car. While she was con­sol­ing the child, the fa­ther ar­rived about 20 min­utes lat­er with his two oth­er daugh­ters.

The of­fi­cer iden­ti­fied him­self to the fa­ther and in­formed him of the of­fence of child en­dan­ger­ment. The fa­ther claimed that he left the child sleep­ing and went with his two oth­er chil­dren to do eye tests “up­stairs.”   

Of­fi­cers of the La Ro­main Po­lice Post al­so ar­rived at the scene.  Up to yes­ter­day af­ter­noon, the fa­ther was still in po­lice cus­tody be­ing ques­tioned.

Last Oc­to­ber, a five-year-old girl had to be hos­pi­talised af­ter she was left in a car for two hours while a fe­male rel­a­tive at­tend­ed a fu­ner­al in Siparia.

The child was found un­con­scious, cov­ered in vom­it and urine.  In 2014, a grand­fa­ther was charged with un­law­ful­ly caus­ing the death of his 17-month-old grand­son af­ter he left him in the back seat of his car in the carpark of the Petrotrin com­pound in Pe­nal and went to work. The grand­fa­ther re­turned sev­er­al hours lat­er and found the tod­dler dead.