“All my joy, gone,” sobbed Shane Gomez, a day after his common-law-wife Stacy Gopaulsingh was chopped to death in a home invasion in Moruga.
In a telephone interview on Christmas Eve, Gomez, who spoke in a low tone, said his wife was three months pregnant.
He said they planned to marry in January and travel to the United States. “I don’t know what to do with myself. I just returned from the doctor,” he lamented.
Police reports stated that shortly before 3 am on Monday the couple and their three-year-old daughter were asleep in their Poui Trace, St Mary’s Village home when Gopaulsingh’s phone began ringing.
Gopaulsingh, 36, answered the phone and went outside to the back of the house. Gomez said he heard three strange voices engaged in what sounded like an argument. When Gomez got up to investigate, a masked man confronted him outside his bedroom and shouted, “Go back in yuh bed if yuh know what good for yuh,” while pointing a gun at him.
They stole a laptop, a brown envelope containing $40,000, US $800 and two wedding bands. The father grabbed his daughter and jumped through a window with her. When he returned shortly after, his wife was lying in blood on the living room floor.
“That night was a shock,” recalled Gomez. He said he did not know what they were arguing about but he heard his wife say, “No, no, I don’t have time for that.” When he got up while holding his daughter in his arms to investigate, he said he was confronted by a masked assailant who pointed a gun at his daughter’s face.
The man ordered him to lie back on the bed. He said he couldn’t save his wife and his daughter. “I could only save one. I couldn’t save the two.”
Gomez, an offshore worker, said they had the money for materials as they were building their home.
“We had our life planned out. Now, I don’t know,” he lamented.
Gomez said he and Gopaulsingh had been together for about eight years. She was employed in the Judiciary and was pursuing a master’s degree. Officers of the Homicide Bureau of Investigations Region 3 are investigating.
