Raheem Abdool
Editorial
Stabroek News
January 5, 2003
On the morning of December 17, a boy's corpse was found in a drain beside the Liliendaal Railway Embankment by the residents of Sophia Front. The body bore numerous marks of violence, and the post mortem revealed that he had died of trauma to the brain. One resident recalled having seen a blue pick-up in the area, and the hypothesis was, therefore, that the child had been killed elsewhere and then dumped at Liliendaal.
Despite the fact that the police issued a detailed description of what he had been wearing at the time - long green pants, a blue, long-sleeved shirt and a pair of badly torn desert boots - no one came forward to claim him for well over a week. It transpired that he was fourteen-year-old Raheem Abdool of the Sad'r Boys Orphanage in Kitty, who according to an official of the institution had gone missing some time between the night of December 16 and the morning of December 17.
In our issue of December 28 we had reported the housemother, Ms Bibi Nazz Hakim, as saying that the boy was last seen asleep on the night of December 16, and was found to have disappeared at 4:00am the next morning when prayers were said. A search of the building revealed that all the doors were still bolted, but a window overlooking an exterior staircase was open, suggesting that he had made good his escape via that route.
Ms Hakim told this newspaper that Raheem had never spent a night away from the orphanage, and that she had made a report to the Kitty Police Station after 24 hours had elapsed. The boy's family, however, said that when they visited the station there was no record of such a report between December 16 and Christmas Day, although an Eve Leary spokesman ventured that it was possible that the report had not been entered into the station logbook.
When Ms Hakim was asked why the relatives had not been informed about Raheem's disappearance - the grandmother had only been told on December 22 when she visited - she replied that the institution had been still searching for him, and was hoping to find him before alerting the family. When she was asked whether she had not seen the newspaper reports about the discovery of an unidentified boy on December 17, the housemother responded that she didn't get the newspapers.
The link with the body found in the drain was made in Christmas week, when Raheem's uncle recognized his nephew from the photograph published in the Guyana Chronicle. For her part Ms Hakim could think of no reason why anyone would want to harm the boy, and expressed puzzlement as to how he ended up in Sophia.
It has to be observed that the management of the orphanage concerned clearly needs to look again at the guidelines issued to staff in the eventuality of boys going missing. They should, for example, have ensured that the report which was made at the police station was entered into the logbook. They should have kept returning to the police to prod them into assisting to locate the child. Had they done so, the police themselves might have made a connection between the missing boy and a murder victim. They surely could have issued descriptions of Raheem to the media when they were hunting for him; that is how most parents and guardians of missing children proceed in this country. In this instance had they done so, the body would have been quickly identified.
The orphanage indicated that it had searched for Raheem. Exactly how it went about this was not disclosed, but one can only conclude that the hunt was not pursued with the zealousness necessary, since not only did it fail to locate him, but somehow or other, despite the reports in all the media and the talk that these reports would inevitably have generated on the street, it heard not a whisper about the Liliendaal body.
In this particular instance, the story had a tragic ending, and even if all reasonable measures had been taken to look for the missing boy after his absence was discovered, it may already have been too late. That, however, is not the point. An orphanage stands in lieu of a parent or guardian, and is obligated to look for a missing child with the same vigour as a parent or guardian. There may in the future be other cases of children who get away, and it is important that everything possible be done as quickly as possible to find them, before any harm comes to them. Furthermore, it is absolutely essential that the relatives of a missing child be informed about his disappearance within a reasonable period; it is simply not acceptable for a grandmother to be told by staff six days after her grandson has climbed out of the window of an institution charged with the responsibility of caring for him, that he cannot be found.
The police have asked for the public's assistance in providing them with leads in their investigation into the killing. The housemother's bewilderment about what happened notwithstanding, it is the staff of the orphanage which is in the best position to assist the police, by questioning the other boys closely about Raheem's friends and contacts - who in turn might know something - and if he ever was involved in activity which the adults in the institution may have known nothing about.
Even if the staff are reluctant to do this, the police themselves could question the boys. Someone out there knows something about what Raheem did, and where he might have been going the night he climbed out of the window, and scrambled over the fence to a rendezvous with a killer.
Surely, despite all the shootings in 2002, we are still not so inured to violence that we cannot be appalled by this most brutal killing of a child. Raheem had a tragic life - his mother was murdered in 1991 - and a cruel death. We can do nothing for him now, except help the police with any little fragment of information which might lead to his murderer. If he cannot have life, at least he should have justice.
