AFTER FIGHTING for his life for the last 27 days, a 32-year-old man succumbed to his injuries yesterday at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
Simon Cherubin, who was attacked at his 8th Ave, New Orleans home on New Year’s morning and suffered multiple lacerations to his body, died in the wee hours of the morning, thereby dashing all his family’s hopes that he would recover.
Overcome by the sad news that she had lost the younger of her two sons, Cherubin’s mother Maura Stewart bawled uncontrollably at her home yesterday evening.
“Father, Father, give me strength! Dem tek way my son from me! Father, you know how hard it was to raise dem two boys and now one gone and leave me,” she wailed as tears trickled down her face.
She managed, amid her grief, to recall her son as one who always looked out for her.
“He would always say, ‘Mummy, make sure you eat. Don’t worry ’bout me; I does eat while I on the road’.”
Recounting the incident, which left Cherubin in an unconscious state since January 1, his stepfather John Stewart said he and his wife had attended church on Old Year’s Night before coming home around three in the morning and falling asleep.
“I got up around six in the morning, turned on the radio, opened the louvres and unlocked the doors, and I lay back down here in the chair, and while I was laying down I heard “Bradung”.”
Startled by the noise, Stewart jumped up to see what had happened, but no sooner had he got up than the door flew open and a young man rushed past him and entered the house with a long collins in hand.
“Where Jammis is? Where Jammis is?” the unknown man shouted before another man rushed in.
Stewart said he ran out of the house to get one of the neighbours to call the police, but by the time he came back, the two men were fleeing from the house, with the bloodied collins.
His wife said the noise also alarmed her and when she came out and saw the men, she started to scream. Her son, too, had ventured out of his bedroom stark naked and encountered his attackers.
“Muuurrda, Muuurrda, leave him alone, leave him alone,” she recalled shouting, but the mourning mother said they wouldn’t stop chopping.
As Cherubin complained for his hand which had been partially severed, his stepfather quickly wrapped it before he weakened and started losing consciousness.
As he was led away on the stretcher, however, he had just enough strength to tell the police who had attacked him.
He never regained consciousness and his family watched over the last few weeks as he suffered, having his forearm removed as a result of infection before his lungs and kidneys collapsed.
While the father of four did not have time to say a verbal goodbye, his mother said her last visit to him on Wednesday evening told her something was wrong.
“He was trying to move, and then he raised his hand as if saying goodbye and then he put it on his chest, and when I felt his legs they were extremely cold . . . I know my son was dying,” she said as the tears flowed again.
Police public relations officer Inspector David Welch confirmed the incident and said investigations were continuing.
