Guyana Observer News

21 years of domestic abuse : Husband drops dead after drinking poison in police station

Sunday, 02 August 2009

Twenty-one years of violent domestic abuse ended on Friday when Clarence Blair went to the Alberttown Police Station and even as the officers looked on, swallowed a quantity of formaldehyde from a bottle. Blair, who thought that he was taking the easy way out, rather than being thrown into the lock-ups, collapsed, and was pronounced dead at the Georgetown Public Hospital, where he was rushed. The former security guard had reported to the police station following an earlier report made by his wife, 38-year old Alexis Blair, who accused her husband of assaulting her.
The most recent report may have been the last straw that broke the camel’s back since this time around the mother of six, including a five-month-old baby, had intended to put a stop to the years of beatings.
Alexis Blair had tears streaming down her badly swollen face soon after she had given a statement to the police yesterday.
She recalled a life of constant abuse and although she suffered, she like many other women never sought to prosecute the abuser.
Police sources described Clarence Blair as a wife-beater about whom several reports were made at the Alberttown Police Station.

“The beatings start years ago but we stop fight for a while because we went to the welfare officer and we took the problem there,” the battered woman recalled.
But the latest beating stemmed from her husband’s suspicions that she was involved in an extra-marital relationship.
Blair’s husband had been out of work for a while and the frustration must have taken its toll on him for he started drinking heavily.
The woman explained that on Tuesday she and her husband were out walking when a friend met them and told her husband that she was unfaithful.
“He ask me and I say it is not my man; that it’s a friend that is working with me. He start to beat me up on the road. When I reached home, he demanded sex. I told him I was not in the mood and he put my head through the bed rail, sit down on me belly and start cuff me up. I get unconscious,” the battered wife told this newspaper.
When she recovered, her husband played the ‘trick’ that most wife beaters use.
He told her that he was sorry and of course she forgave him.
But the following morning, the beatings resumed and continued until Friday. Alexis Blair was rendered unconscious.
“I hear he brother pick me up and take me to the hospital and when I recovered I come back and made a report to the station,” she said.
With stricter laws in place against domestic violence, Clarence Blair was in no mood to face the consequences that awaited him.
He disappeared when the police went to his home to arrest him.
It is believed that during that period he had made up his mind to take the easy way out.
His friend, Kerwin Hermanstyne, said that he had no idea that Blair was about to take such a drastic step.
Hermanstyne said that they were having a ‘drink’ in the yard that Blair and his family shared with other relatives when they learnt that the police were looking for the wife beater.
Realising that his wife had reported the matter, he had left prior to the police coming.
“After he get away from de police, he come back in de yard about two to three hours later and he ask we fuh a shot,” Hermanstyne said
The other drinkers were alarmed when Blair took the bottle of high wine and put it to his mouth and swallowed about three mouthfuls at once.
They admonished him and he became angry.
“He turn and tell we he gat a ‘buckman’ (rum) wha he just buy. He tek out de bottle and show we and tell we he ain’t giving we none. And den he start fuh cuss. He say I going at de station and when he go deh, he ain’t coming back,” Hermanstyne recalled.
None of the persons around suspected that the bottle that Blair had shown to them contained poison and not alcohol.
“We thought was rum because the contents in de bottle appeared to be rum.”
Hermanstyne said that a few minutes later he heard that Blair was frothing at the station.
He went to the Alberttown Police Station where he helped to take Blair to the hospital.
But by then it was too late.
According to Blair’s oldest daughter who was accompanying him to the station, when they had reached about a corner away, the man requested that she take his bicycle and wait for him at the station.
The teenager said that when she rode off, she saw her father drink some of the contents from the bottle he had in his pockets.
“He drink that one on the road and then he drink the next one in the station. The police tell me go home and tell me mother dat me father drink poison,” Blair’s daughter told this newspaper.
Hermanstyne is convinced that Blair became frustrated because of being out of a job and having to depend on his wife.
“De woman now, she working hard and he bullying she fuh de money. So all these things cause this,” he said.
Most of the beatings took place in the presence of the couple’s children and several relatives and when they would intervene, Blair would desist for a while and then resume his beatings.
“The last words he tell me yesterday (Friday) was ‘I gun kill you and kill me self.’ But before he kill me I escape and report to de police,” Alexis Blair said.

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