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Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Dad never showed violence to toddlers, says grieving mom

by

20140415

Af­ter tak­ing the life of his two chil­dren and tex­ting about it, Bar­ry Kari­math used two tie straps to choke him­self to death. The first strap broke, but the sec­ond one al­lowed him to com­plete his task.Kari­math's au­top­sy yes­ter­day re­vealed he placed the plas­tic straps around his neck and pulled un­til his brain was de­prived of oxy­gen.In a tele­phone in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian, pathol­o­gist Dr Valery Alexan­drov said the strap was still around the 33-year-old when he per­formed the au­top­sy. The of­fi­cial cause of death was as­phyx­i­a­tion.

Kari­math's two chil­dren, ten-month-old Omari May­ers and his sis­ter Kean­na "Keke" May­ers, three, al­so died of as­phyx­i­a­tion. It was ini­tial­ly thought the chil­dren were poi­soned. Alexan­drov said he was still not cer­tain of this as the stom­ach con­tents of the chil­dren still had to be sent for test­ing to de­ter­mine if they were poi­soned. He added that in­gest­ing poi­so­nous sub­stance such as lanate could al­so re­sult in as­phyx­i­a­tion.Speak­ing with the me­dia at her Barataria home yes­ter­day, the chil­dren's moth­er, Ok­il­ia May­ers, said Kari­math was not a vi­o­lent per­son.

"He was nor­mal to me. He loved his chil­dren as far as I knew, be­cause he was al­ways so kind to them. So when he start­ed send­ing the texts on Sat­ur­day, I didn't be­lieve he would ac­tu­al­ly harm the chil­dren," May­ers said.

The text mes­sages read that he "deal with Bub­ba" and was about to "deal with Ke-Ke". An­oth­er text mes­sage read that May­ers should not cry for him while an­oth­er spoke of the young Kean­na tak­ing her last breath."He was the jeal­ous type. But his threats were al­ways di­rect­ed to me, nev­er the chil­dren. I can say hon­est to God, I nev­er ex­pect­ed him to do any­thing like this," she said.Ac­cord­ing to po­lice re­ports, around 6 am on Sun­day of­fi­cers re­ceived a re­port that the three bod­ies were found near a bam­boo patch next to a pump­kin farm in Matu­ra. When po­lice ar­rived, they found Kari­math's body and those of his two chil­dren.The farmer said around 9.30 pm Sat­ur­day night he went to his gar­den to spend the night and saw Kari­math stand­ing near the trace with his chil­dren. He said when he ques­tioned Kari­math he said had paid a woman $6,000 for a bush bath and was wait­ing for her.


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