The turn of events in a recent violent scenario in Monchy, Gros Islet reads like a movie script. Still, with a spate of violent and sexual attacks on women and children here, not to mention a number of suicides, the story, as gripping as it is, is now, for many, the new Saint Lucian reality. While the police have put out the customary “police are investigating the circumstances” press release, relatives, friends, neighbours and eye-witnesses are giving their accounts of what could have been a suicide-attempted murder case.
Dead from what is widely believed to be the consumption of a poisonous substance is 33-year-old Nathan Chassang also known as “Shawn” of Monchy, Gros-Islet. Shawn allegedly consumed the substance on Wednesday, April 20, 2016 shortly after stabbing his common law partner, Davia Hypolite also of Monchy, on the day in question. The young woman, who is said to be 19 years old, was transported to Victoria Hospital where she has since been listed as stable.
According to relatives Chassang and Hypolite had a tumultuous relationship and on Wednesday the young woman decided that she had enough and would be leaving. However, relatives of Chassang have countered that the woman was the one who had been tormenting Shawn by not being sincere. Be that as it may, all agree that no life was worth losing over the relationship.
By an uncle of Hypolite’s account, the young woman was stabbed at least four times in the back as she turned to walk away from her partner. According to the uncle, Lance Mathurin, his niece is alive today maybe because she played dead after the fourth blow to stop Chassang from really killing her. Hypolite was later discovered by neighbours bleeding profusely after Chassang had fled the scene. An ambulance was summoned to transport her to the hospital.
The assailant is reported to have later consumed a poisonous substance near the Monchy beach and was also taken to hospital where he later died.
The uncle recalled that on Saturday April 16, Hypolite told him she wanted to talk because things between her and her boyfriend were not going well. He said that it was not until Wednesday however, while at VH to witness a post mortem on a relative, that he was told that his niece was at the hospital.
Mathurin said that when his niece regained consciousness she told him about her ordeal: she recounted that when she told her boyfriend that their relationship was over – because he was very abusive and always beating her – she was stabbed in the back with a pair of scissors as she walked away. The uncle advised that Hypolite maintained that Shawn also used a knife to inflict her injuries.
The incident occurred in a house where the two lived together.
“She told me that she fell and when she fell, the guy now took his hands and put it in her throat, like strangling her,” the uncle said. It was at that point she apparently decided that her only option of survival was to play dead.
On Thursday Davia Hypolite asserted on what appeared to be her Facebook page that no-one is considering the other side of the issue where she could have lost her life had she not fought to save herself. This after relatives of the deceased made some disparaging comments about her. “I am suffering at the hospital – no one see that, but God is in control,” she wrote, adding: “RIP Shawn Nathan Chassang.”
