The au­top­sy on 57-year-old Shelawai­htie “Meera” Be­dasse has been post­poned af­ter her body was redi­rect­ed from the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre in Port-of-Spain to the San Fer­nan­do mor­tu­ary, leav­ing rel­a­tives even more con­vinced that her death was linked to ex­tor­tion and death threats pri­or to her dis­ap­pear­ance.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, her son, Rus­sel Be­dasse, said the fam­i­ly has been anx­ious to con­duct a thor­ough post-mortem to de­ter­mine the true cause of death.

“Some­thing is wrong. Why are we on­ly lim­it­ing our­selves to hang­ing by sui­cide? Isn’t the post-mortem sup­posed to find the cause of death?” he asked.

Be­dasse said his fam­i­ly was told by Dr Hu­bert Dais­ley of the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal that, based on the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing his moth­er’s death, a post-mortem at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre would have been ap­pro­pri­ate. How­ev­er, on ar­rival at Foren­sics, Be­dasse said they were in­formed by po­lice that the Foren­sic Sci­ence’s pathol­o­gist would not ac­cept the body for ex­am­i­na­tion as the po­lice’s ini­tial re­port clas­si­fied the case as a hang­ing.

“We’ve been high­light­ing things to the po­lice—the height of where she was found, the knot, the ap­pear­ance, the phone calls she got, the peo­ple who came look­ing for her—and yet they are still in­sist­ing it’s sui­cide. Some­thing is wrong,” Be­dasse said.

He al­so claimed that an in­di­vid­ual con­nect­ed to his moth­er’s case had vis­it­ed both her work­place and his home on the day she went miss­ing.

“We be­lieve she may have been in trou­ble. How can some­one hap­pen to be at my moth­er’s work­place the morn­ing she went miss­ing and then come down to my ad­dress look­ing for her?” he asked.

When asked whether the fam­i­ly be­lieves ex­tor­tion played a role, Be­dasse said, “Yes, we think my moth­er was a vic­tim of ex­tor­tion. This is big­ger than we even imag­ine. We’re not just fo­cused on sui­cide.”

He claimed there had been at­tempts to ex­tort mon­ey from a third par­ty and that his moth­er may have been caught up in the sit­u­a­tion.

Be­dasse said they have pro­vid­ed po­lice with phone records and oth­er in­for­ma­tion. They are now call­ing for the post-mortem to be done at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre to en­sure trans­paren­cy.

“We need an­swers. We’re suf­fer­ing,” Be­dasse said. A po­lice of­fi­cer, who re­quest­ed anonymi­ty, said the mat­ter is un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion.