While homicide detectives hope that a three-year-old girl may be able to shed some light on the murders of her parents, Shelly-Ann Ragoonanan and Wazir Mohammed, Children’s Authority chairman Hanif Benjamin says that managing her trauma is critical to her mental development.
The toddler and her eight-month-old brother remained at the San Fernando General Hospital yesterday. They suffered malnutrition, having been trapped in their Clarke Road, Penal home for three days among the rotting corpses of Ragoonanan, 43, Mohammed, 57 and their mentally ill uncle Nazim Mohammed, 52. A report stated that since August 11, the couple’s eldest son Vishard, who lived along the Penal Rock Road, had been trying to contact them. But when all calls failed, he and a friend went to his parent’s home on August 14 where he met a locked gate. Vishard climbed over the gate and found that a door to the house was broken. Near the door, he found his father lying dead. His father had been shot and his throat slit. Inside were the bodies of his mother and uncle. His siblings remained unhurt inside and were immediately taken to the Siparia District Health Facility. So far, no motive has been determined for the killing and the only witnesses were the children. Investigators from the Homicide Bureau of Investigations, Region Three said this was a challenge and a social worker may be needed to determine whether the child can help.
But speaking on CNC3’s The Morning Brew on Monday, Benjamin, who is a clinical traumatologist with The Centre for Human Development, said that trauma intervention is needed to ensure the children get back to a life of normalcy. He said that the social environment that surrounds the children needs to foster proper support. At their age, he said their mental recovery is possible as they are “still in a magical thinking phase and do not understand death.” To them, they might think that mommy and daddy are asleep. “In all of my work, I have never come across something as tragic as what was unveiled over the last couple of days where these children would have been living among the dead, literally. Of course, if you understand basic biology, you will understand the progression of a dead body and the image of children living in such a situation, confused, is even more worrying. Today, what we have are children who are severely traumatised or who can become severely traumatised because they would have experienced a traumatic incident.
“Coming out of that incident, we have to be very careful with how we treat with them to ensure that their life trajectory can be put back on track. Right now, those children are indeed traumatised and require a high level of trauma intervention to ensure that we can get them back to a place,” Benjamin said.
He said the children as well as others around the country who may have experienced similar trauma should be monitored for depressive symptoms such as withdrawal, a lack of interest in play. Additionally, regressive reactions such as encopresis, enuresis, nyctophobia (fear of the dark), clingy or excessive crying can be experienced.
Benjamin said that with students spending up to eight hours a day with their teachers, educators should be trained to handle children dealing with trauma. He said the school in part of the environment that shapes a child’s development and teachers would need to understand.