Where do we go from here?
It is 5am and I am up drinking my coffee my thoughts on Andrea. I think that she woke up last Friday morning. I wonder if she too used to drink tea or coffee in the morning. I have not slept well since last Friday when she went missing, in fact the entire past week has been a blur, I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything just going through the motions. I’ve heard so many times this week “love, you ok?” from my husband because he found me just zoned out staring. I know I am not alone in feeling this way because my entire facebook feed this week has been about Andrea.
When she chose that white dress for her UWI graduation, when she posed for that picture that we’ve all now seen, she couldn’t have known that it would be shared thousands of times across all social media platforms and the newspapers. It was Friday evening; we all know what Friday evenings after work feel like. You’re drained and tired and just want to reach home and rest. I wonder if she had plans for the weekend. I picture her and her friend that she travelled home with, walking to the taxi stand laughing and chatting, jumping into the taxi ignorant to the fact that she had just breathed her last breath of freedom and life as she knew it.
At what point did she realise that she was never going to make it home? Did her stomach clench and did she sweat as I do when I’m nervous? Did she beg for her life? Did she pray in her head? Did she call for her late mum, and dad? Was she able to scream for help? What did she have to endure? Dear God, what did these monsters do to her?
Did they wake up on Friday morning eager to kidnap, assault, and kill a young lady? When did Friday evening kidnap and murder become a thing? When they obtained the false H licence plate, was it with this in mind? The premeditation to get a false H plate and pick up an innocent young lady who thinks she is safe because she is not jumping in a PH car, only to kidnap her is chilling. Did that false confidence in her safety give their perverted minds an extra surge of pleasure? I know that the autopsy has not yet confirmed sexual assault, but the fact that she was found in her “pink underwear” as our ever sensitive press revealed last night, leaves little room for doubt.
How does one grow up with such little regard for female life that you can kidnap a woman, rape her, and kill her and discard her body like a piece of garbage? What life do you live when you plan a kidnap and murder with your friends like the rest of us plan an after-work drink or night out. Was Andrea already dead when one of the perpetrators answered the calls from her concerned dad and aunty? Had he already desecrated her body when he spoke of chopping off her ears or told the aunt he was Jesus? Was that his way of telling her Andrea wasn’t coming back? That like Jesus he had already taken her life? What monsters walk among us?
Andrea and Ashanti. Two young women that we have lost and mourned together as a nation. Andrea was heading home after a long week at work, Ashanti was heading to meet relatives on a Sunday afternoon. Both of them were looking forward to reaching their destinations, both of them had people who loved them waiting on their arrival. Neither of them arrived because some sicko thought that satisfying their perverted needs was more important than their lives.
There is so much more I would like to write on this matter, about how does someone with 70 charges to his name and a known serial rapist walk the island as a free man? About the fact that by the time this case finally comes to trial we would have lost many more women at the hands of sick perverts and our rage would have dissipated and this will all be a sad memory. About the thousands of women who today must wake up in Trinidad and take a taxi to go work and get back home this evening. Will they be scrutinising the licence plates to ensure it’s not false? Is it that every time a woman steps into a taxi now she is rolling a die as to whether she lives or dies? I guess the real question is, where do we go from here Trinidad?
