Gunman kills cosmetologist, 18, after snatching $8,000 phone
After snatching her $8,000 cell phone, a gunman fatally shot 18-year-old Ashmini Hariram in the head at around
Ashmini Hariram
11:15 hrs yesterday on the Lusignan, East Coast Demerara Railway Embankment, before fleeing in a car.
Hariram, a cosmetologist, was about six houses away from her Lot 9, Lusignan Railway Embankment home when the killer emerged from what eyewitness described as a burgundy-coloured vehicle and shot her at close range to the right side of the head.
The shooter and the driver then fled east along the embankment.
The slain teen was wearing a gold chain at the time, but the gunman reportedly made no attempt to relieve her of the jewellery.
Police recovered a .32 warhead and a bullet casing of similar calibre from the scene. Kaieteur News understands that an eyewitness described the killer as being fair in complexion.
Some police sources feel that the killing was a robbery reminiscent of the still unsolved murder of Bank Teller Sheema Mangar, who was run over by a car, after one of the occupants had snatched her cell phone. But other sources suggested that the senseless brutality of the crime indicated that robbery was not the killer’s primary motive. Police also said there is no indication that the teen had done anything to antagonize her attacker.
“If it was a robbery, why was she killed execution-style? We are very much puzzled by this,” one source said. Police were yesterday evening taking statements from the slain teen’s boyfriend, whom the victim had reportedly only met a few months ago. However, a source said this in no way suggested that he was a suspect.
Ashmini Hariram was walking with a female cousin at the time and the cousin alleged that the gunman and driver sat in a parked car on the Lusignan railway embankment, along the same route that the cousins had to pass.
Fiona Somwaroo, the cousin, told Kaieteur News that she had accompanied Hariram earlier in the day to pay some telephone bills.
“She (Hariram) had some people hair to do, so she tell me that she had to get some bleaching powder and we went and get that and then we took a bus to go home.”
They exited the bus on the East Coast Demerara public road, and then walked to the Lusignan railway embankment and headed east to Hariram’s home, where some of her customers were waiting.
“We were talking and joking around and then she ask me for $200 to go to a shop to buy hair colouring and I gave her the money to buy it.
As they approached the shop, Somwaroo said that she noticed that a car was parked “a little away” from the shop. “But I thought someone just parked bad. I had no idea someone was going to come out and shoot my cousin.”
She said that the hairdresser was counting the cash and preparing to enter the shop when someone exited the car and grabbed Hariram’s ‘Icemobile’ phone.
Ashmini’s mother Khemwattie Samaroo
“After he grabbed the phone, he shot her, got into the car and they (the shooter and his accomplice) left.”
According to Somwaroo, the gunman had not spoken to Hariram. She confirmed that the gunman, whom she could not describe, had made no attempt to relieve her cousin of the gold chain she was wearing at the time.
The hairdresser’s mother, Khemwattie Samaroo, said that she was at home when someone informed her that her daughter had been injured in an accident. However, someone else told her that Ashmini had been shot.
According to the mother, she rushed to scene where she saw her daughter “covered in blood.”
The teen reportedly succumbed long before she could be rushed to the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation, where several distraught relatives later gathered.
“I want my daughter back. She was my baby. She is the smallest of my four children. She don’t trouble nobody, I don’t know why they killed her,” her mother lamented, while speaking to reporters at the hospital.
“She was a pleasant person…all the neighbours liked her. She didn’t walk about in the evening; she had no problems with anybody,” another close relative said.
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