Hope's end
Suspect leads cops to girl's body
Richard Charan rcharan@trinidadexpress.com
Wednesday, May 28th 2008
dead: Eight-year-old Hope Arismandez.
In an abandoned canefield less than a mile from her home, the search ended yesterday evening for eight-year-old Hope Arismandez.
Taken from the house four days ago by a man she loved and trusted, Hope's decaying body was defiled.
The girl, who wanted to be a teacher, was found wearing only a pink top, face down in the dirt, stabbed several times.
Police said it appeared from the position of her body she had been sodomised and raped. It appeared she had also been cut open. A knife was found near the body.
The body was found at the side of a canefield road off the Pierre Connector Road in Chaguanas at 4.15 p.m. Fifteen minutes earlier, a 28-year-old man in police custody since Hope's disappearance is said to have confessed.
Many of the people who lined the road to mourn Hope's killing were on their way to the Uriah Butler Highway to protest last week's killing of young businessman Surindra Bridegmohan. (See other story)
Instead, they stopped to rail against the hopelessness of it all, and to remember similar child killings: Four-year-old Amy Annamunthodo and six-year-old old Sean Luke.
Hope, a first standard pupil of the Carapichaima Roman Catholic School, lived with her mother, Sherma Ranjoon, 58, and a 14-year-old brother, in an apartment complex at Lime Head Road, Chase Village, Chaguanas.
Last Saturday night, Ranjoon said she went to work at a supermarket in Chaguanas and left Hope in the care of a male companion. She said Hope called her at 9 a.m. to say the man was preparing a meal of chicken and fries. Ranjoon said when she reached home at 11 a.m., the apartment was empty and when the man returned, he told a story of taking his dump truck for a fuel refill and drinking two beers before returning home.
The man said he thought Hope had gone to the apartment of a neighbouring tenant. That tenant said she locked her doors at 8.30 p.m. Ranjoon panicked. She called the police.
The man, a truck driver originally of Cemetery Street, Warrenville, has been in custody at the Freeport Police Station since then. He denied knowing anything about Hope.
Yesterday, up to 2 p.m., Hope's parents, who are separated, still believed she was alive.
Ranjoon went to a church in the village with her Bible and prayed for her daughter to come home safely. "I believe she is alive. Somebody kidnapped her. I just want them to let her go," she said then.
Hope's father, Ronald Arismandez, 58, said he and Hope were close in every respect and she was smart enough to say if anything bad had happened to her in the past. She never did. Arismandez too said his Hope was alive, and asked that the police bring her home by nighttime.
Instead, two of the better homicide officers-ASP Johnny Abraham and Insp Stanley Ramdeen-were assigned to the case yesterday. They visited the home, went to the Freeport Police Station and got the suspect to talk. He took them to where he killed the girl. The airship had hovered above the very canefield for three hours the previous day.
Chaguanas Mayor Suruj Rambachan joined the mourners behind the crime-scene tape yesterday. He said crime was out of control, the State was powerless, and all hope was lost.Officers seized the suspect's truck to conduct forensic tests on it yesterday. Investigations are continuing.
