Construction worker wrestles carjacker in trench
… as accomplice escapes with car
An alleged carjacker was arrested yesterday after a 54-year-old construction worker had wrestled him into a trench at Non Pareil, East Coast Demerara, and then tied him to a utility pole around 12:30 hrs.
As the two men were fighting, a second accomplice escaped with Garfield Griffith’s car, bearing registration number, HB 4955.
Griffith, a father of three, recalled that he was having lunch in his car that was parked in front of a construction site when two young men rode up to him on a bicycle and asked if there was any vacancy, to which he responded in the negative.
“The car was on, because I was charging the phone. The other construction workers were at another building sheltering from the sun and then these guys come. I tell them that it doesn’t make sense I hire them and I don’t have money to pay them,” Griffith said.
He recounted that the men then left and a few minutes later, he spotted one of them heading in his direction on foot.
“He come and ask me for a crescent (adjustable spanner) and I tell him that I don’t have, and he walk and go behind the car. I was looking at him (through the rear view mirror) to see what he was doing. In that (mirror), I see the next one come back on the bicycle, and both of them come and ask back for work,” the victim related.
He added that the men told him that they badly needed a job.
“While talking to one of them, the next one walked on the bridge and he took a bottle with liquid out his pants and rushed up to me and throw it in my face. Like he was aiming for my eyes, but it go in my mouth.”
Griffith said that he immediately jumped out of his vehicle and grabbed the suspect next to him and the two of them started fighting. They ended up in the trench.
“I choked him in the trench, but while I had he, the other one jump in the car and drive away. I couldn’t loose the one I had, because I woulda risk losing both of them,” the Crane, West Coast Demerara resident said.
He explained that when he overpowered the suspect in the trench, the man tried to make a deal with him—let him go and he would tell him where his accomplice took the car.
“When we in the trench, people start coming out and we tie he to a post when I bring he out,” the man said, while adding that the residents dealt the young man several lashes with nearby cement blocks. “I never see block (cement) loose up like how it loose up on that man.”
Griffith says that he lost money, his driver’s licence, bank card and other documents.
A report was made at the Vigilance Police Station, where the suspect remains in custody.