Ot­to Car­ring­ton

The on­go­ing search for Terese Lynch, 43, of Lopinot, was ham­pered be­cause of a dri­ve-by shoot­ing and mur­der at Orop­une Gar­dens in Pi­ar­co on Thurs­day.

The search was led by the T&T Fire and Po­lice Ser­vices, Lopinot vil­lagers, along with the Hunters Search and Res­cue team. It was halt­ed along the Arou­ca Riv­er, near Trinci­ty Mall.

The search was con­duct­ed on Wednes­day night in­to yes­ter­day morn­ing. It led to search par­ty op­er­a­tions along the Ari­ma Old Road, Gold­en Grove Road and then to the Arou­ca and Orop­une rivers.

This is when po­lice of­fi­cers asked for the search to stop due to the in­ci­dent at Orop­une.

On Wednes­day, just af­ter 1 pm, Lynch, a moth­er of one and broth­er William Ram­lo­gan, 45, both of La Pas­to­ra Vil­lage, Lopinot, were try­ing to cross a ravine near Mc David Trace when she slipped and was car­ried away by the rag­ing wa­ters, a sit­u­a­tion cre­at­ed by ad­verse overnight weath­er con­di­tions.

Hunters Search and Res­cue cap­tain Val­lance Ram­ab­harat told Guardian Me­dia, “We were asked to stand down dur­ing the search be­cause there was a shoot­ing in Orop­une Gar­dens and the po­lice said it was an ac­tive scene and so they asked us to stand down. How­ev­er, at about 2.15 pm, we got two calls and sight­ing of a body float­ing in the riv­er next to the Trinci­ty Mall.”

He said while there was in­for­ma­tion com­ing that a body had been spot­ted at the riv­er be­hind Trinci­ty Mall, it did not pan out.

“So what we did was we quick­ly left where we were, at the Ari­ma Old Road, I came down here to do a thor­ough search. We met the Fire Ser­vices, I don’t know if they al­so re­ceived a call, but we did a com­pre­hen­sive search of this area. We con­tin­ue to search this area un­til maybe night­fall and make our way back to the Ari­ma Old Road,” he said.

Ram­ba­harat ap­pealed to mem­bers the pub­lic who have been send­ing in­for­ma­tion to en­sure it was ac­cu­rate be­cause it can waste their time.

He said, “We look for­ward to cred­i­ble in­for­ma­tion from the pub­lic and they’ve got to re­alise that in the field, when we get calls, we have to leave where we are and go and search that area. It’s un­for­tu­nate if we don’t find any­thing in re­sponse to those calls. It throws us off, it throws off our grid, our sched­ule, every­thing. So cur­rent­ly, we are mak­ing our way back to where we were to con­tin­ue to search.”

Rel­a­tives and vil­lagers are al­so on hand giv­ing sup­port to the fam­i­ly.

The search is ex­pect­ed to re­sumes to­day fur­ther down the riv­er.

His team and the au­thor­i­ties man­aged to com­plete search­es of the Sur­rey Riv­er and Lopinot Riv­er from the Ari­ma Old Road to the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route yes­ter­day.