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Friday, February 28, 2025

Mother of 3 gunned down at parlour by ‘customer’

by

Sascha Wilson
28 days ago
20250131

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

Ten­ants of Build­ing C in Or­chid Gar­dens, Pleas­antville, are trau­ma­tised af­ter a woman from the area was mur­dered in their build­ing.

Moth­er of two Chez­er­ae Kid­ney-Ram­dass, 39, of Apart­ment 13, was shot dead in her apart­ment around 3.40 pm on Wednes­day by a man pre­tend­ing to be a cus­tomer. 

She op­er­at­ed a small par­lour from her apart­ment on the ground floor and con­duct­ed sales through her bed­room win­dow.

Cus­tomers would ring a bell to sig­nal that they came to make a pur­chase. Her broth­er Je­reme Kid­ney-Ram­dass, 40, re­called that he was in his bed­room wait­ing to watch a foot­ball match when he heard some­one by the win­dow and the per­son asked for some­thing.

“She asked her son to bring three soft drinks and I hear, pax, pax, pax and same time the rain buss down. I rolled off the bed and I see my nephew stoop down on the cor­ri­dor.”

He asked him if he was okay and then went in­to his sis­ter’s bed­room.

“I say ‘Chez­er­ae gun­shots’. Ah say ‘you okay’, I saw her foot, she is a red girl and I saw her foot black and I saw the cur­tain smok­ing from the bul­let holes and I re­alised she was dead. She just turn black one time.” His nephew, who is 18 years old, was not in­jured but there were bul­let holes in the bed­room wall. 

Crime scene ex­perts re­trieved ten spent shells at the scene. 

Puz­zled as to why she was mur­dered, Kid­ney-Ram­dass was hope­ful that the po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tion would un­earth who killed his sis­ter and why.

“I not vex with no­body I just leave it in the hands of God,” he said. Kid­ney-Ram­dass said his sis­ter was not in­volved in any il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ties and he was un­aware of any threats to her life.

“She was a straight­for­ward per­son. Don’t put up with no bull... She change her life. She stop drink­ing, she go­ing to church. She bought a car and would drop and pick up her chil­dren from school. My sis­ter was a favourite. She was loved.”

He said his sis­ter al­so has a 16-year-old son but he stayed by his fa­ther. Her two sons will be writ­ing the CSEC ex­am in a few months.

The broth­er added that her fo­cus was en­sur­ing that her chil­dren re­ceived a good ed­u­ca­tion, did well and even­tu­al­ly move out of the build­ing which is of­ten re­ferred to as the “ghet­to.”

Lament­ing that there were oth­er mur­ders in the build­ing, he said they had asked HDC to re­lo­cate them but ad­mit­ted that they first have to set­tle their fi­nan­cial sta­tus with HDC.

While in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to the woman’s mur­der are on­go­ing by Homi­cide Bu­reau Re­gion 3 de­tec­tives, they re­ceived pre­lim­i­nary in­for­ma­tion the shoot­ing may have been drug-re­lat­ed. Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that the po­lice re­cent­ly con­duct­ed a State of Emer­gency search ex­er­cise in the area.

There were four oth­er mur­ders in the build­ing in re­cent years.


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