Derek Achong

The moth­er of a 17-year-old girl of Mor­vant, who went miss­ing in Au­gust last year, is seek­ing as­sis­tance to get coun­selling to help cope. 

In a brief tele­phone in­ter­view, yes­ter­day Ali­cia Williams, the moth­er of Latisha St Paul, ex­pressed con­cern over her men­tal state af­ter a de­com­pos­ing body, sus­pect­ed to be her daugh­ter, was found in a precipice off the North Coast Road in Mar­aval, al­most two weeks ago. 

“I need some­one to talk to. I feel like my head is go­ing to ex­plode,” Williams said. 

“I am try­ing to hold on but it is hard,” she lament­ed. 

Williams claimed that sev­er­al weeks af­ter her daugh­ter was re­port­ed miss­ing, she was trolled by a woman from To­ba­go, who she had a pre­vi­ous dis­pute with. 

“I got a mes­sage say­ing that I done lose one child and I should watch my oth­er chil­dren,” Williams said, as she claimed that the ma­li­cious mes­sage on­ly served to ex­ac­er­bate the an­guish she was feel­ing due to her daugh­ter’s dis­ap­pear­ance. 

Williams said she re­port­ed the in­ci­dent to the po­lice and went to To­ba­go to con­front the woman.

How­ev­er, she claimed that nei­ther she nor the po­lice lo­cat­ed the woman. 

In­formed that the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) Vic­tim and Wit­ness Sup­port Unit and the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices pro­vide such coun­selling and psy­choso­cial sup­port, Williams promised to reach out to them for as­sis­tance. 

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia, one week af­ter her daugh­ter was re­port­ed miss­ing in ear­ly Au­gust last year, Williams claimed that her daugh­ter dis­ap­peared af­ter drop­ping her new­born ba­by off by her. 

“She come home, she was to go and get milk and stuff for the ba­by, to drop off for the ba­by. That was about Sat­ur­day lunchtime, and from Sat­ur­day to now we ain’t get no news, noth­ing,” Williams said. 

She claimed that when she re­port­ed her daugh­ter miss­ing, her re­port was dis­missed by po­lice as her daugh­ter had run away from the St Jude’s Home for Girls in Bel­mont in 2018. 

“The po­lice in the Mor­vant say she by some man, you know what your daugh­ter does do,” Williams said.

Williams said they even­tu­al­ly took her re­port and passed the case on to the An­ti-Kid­nap­ping Unit. 

On April 2, po­lice of­fi­cers re­spond­ed to a re­port of a body be­ing found in a 50-foot precipice. 

With the as­sis­tance of the T&T Fire Ser­vice’s Search and Res­cue Unit, the body which was wrapped in plas­tic, a sheet and a com­forter and se­cured us­ing duct tape was re­cov­ered. 

The vic­tim’s head was wrapped in a plas­tic bag and ap­peared to have a wound on the left side. 

Al­though Williams spec­u­lat­ed that the body was her daugh­ter based on the cloth­ing and un­der­wear it was clad in, she was still asked to pro­vide DNA sam­ples for test­ing for of­fi­cial con­fir­ma­tion.

The sam­ples were tak­en at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre in St James last week. 

De­tec­tives of the Re­gion One Homi­cide Bu­reau are con­tin­u­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions.