Police this morning took into custody a deportee of Crooked Tree Village, accused of bludgeoning a woman into a state of unconsciousness, breaking her jawbone, gashing the back of her head, and bruising the right arm she was using to defend herself, during an altercation inside her yard on New Year’s night, January 1.
Alda Mae Jex (formerly Gillett), mother of two, left the Northern Regional Hospital this afternoon with her husband, Alex Jex, to seek further medical attention in Belize City, where they hope she can undergo surgery to repair her broken jaw.
Jex said his wife was undergoing surgery this evening, and would be taken home immediately after for a six-week recovery. The dental surgeon, Rafael Samos, said Jex, classified the injuries as grievous harm.
Suffering partial amnesia, she still can’t remember what happened the night she was attacked, said Jex.
Meanwhile, reports to Amandala are that police have apprehended the suspect, John Tillett, Jr., 23, this morning and took him into custody. He is detained in Ladyville, pending charges.
Doctors advised Mrs. Jex that she should not talk much, so we spoke with her husband and close friend to get an account of what occurred on Friday night, New Year’s Day, when she was attacked by a man villagers say was intoxicated.
Jex said he was angry when he learned what had happened to his wife, but he decided to leave things in the hands of the law.
Caresa, Jex’s friend, told Amandala that she witnessed the whole incident unfold at around 7 p.m. that Friday, New Year’s Day.
Mrs. Jex questioned a deportee, suspected of criminal activity in the area, asking him what he was doing near her house, when he knew she was not at home, where her two children, a girl 13 and a younger child, 4, were home alone.
“He cursed her, the ‘B’ word,” said Caresa, adding that a quarrel immediately ensued between the two.
The attacker, who was already on the street, returned to the yard, picked up a wooden plank that was lying in the yard and charged at Alda Mae Jex, said Caresa.
Jex backed up and put her right hand up to shield her face, causing her to suffer a broken jaw and bruised arm. She stumbled backwards, fell on a beach cruiser bicycle in the yard and suffered a head injury as well, she added.
Caresa thinks that had she not wrapped her friend’s dreadlocks into a bun, it is possible she might have suffered a fatal head injury.
“The thing [the bicycle part] went right through her bun,” said Caresa, saying that her friend had to get four stitches to close the painful wound.
The attacker just stood at the gate and stared at the scene, before he rode off, she added.
Meanwhile, Alda Mae had lost consciousness and sounded as if she was snoring, said her friend. Blood gushed out of her mouth. When she was put on the sofa (in a relative’s house in the same yard), the blood that rushed out of her mouth almost choked her, Caresa added.
Jex revived and began to speak 15 minutes after the incident, but could not remember what had just happened, even after they stitched her head injury at the Northern Regional Hospital in Orange Walk later that night.
Jex was still spitting blood and was still suffering partial amnesia up to this morning, Monday, said Caresa.
According to Alda Mae’s husband, he was told that his wife needs to be transferred to the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital in Belize City, because only one government surgeon can do the job, and that’s where the doctor is assigned. An ambulance was supposed to take his wife to the KHMH this morning, but Jex said he decided to transport her himself when he saw that there had been no movements to make it happen.
Dr. Samos, the dental surgeon, is incidentally on leave from the KHMH, and so Jex had to visit his private office on Vasquez Avenue, where the jaw operation was being conducted this evening, the husband told us.
Village Council chairman, George Guest, told Amandala that Tillett, the man detained for the attack on Mrs. Jex, had gone to see him that night intoxicated, but he told him to come back when he was sober.
Guest said that he heard “a lot of screaming and shouting.” His wife, Shirley, went to see what was happening and ran back saying, “Somebody just killed Alda Mae.”
Shocked, he called the police, while his wife, Alda Mae’s aunt, called a village nurse.
Guest said that Donald Gillett (a distant cousin of Mrs. Jex) is the only policeman in the village of 923 residents. The officer in charge of the Ladyville Police Station, Calbert Flowers, confirmed this, saying that the situation is similar in other nearby villages such as Bermudian Landing.
Flowers said that police had received the report of the incident, and while Tillett is in custody in Ladyville, he has not yet been charged, because police have yet to receive statements on what exactly happened on Friday.
They are also awaiting, said Flowers, a medical certificate to classify the extent of Mrs. Jex’s injuries.
Flowers said he could not confirm reports to our news desk that the suspect had also beaten his girlfriend that same night in his drunken state with the same piece of wood used to injure Jex. Amandala did learn from another official source in the village that the girlfriend was seen with bruises since, but claimed that she had fallen down.
Guest claims that one of Tillett’s relatives, an ex-police, had been hiding him over the weekend.
He also said that he had been lobbying for a police station for the village for five years now. Officer Gillett, a proud, re-enlisted cop who has been posted there alone for the past five years, said that while he feels himself capable of policing the village, and sees no issue being the only man posted there, the lack of a police station in the village “should be addressed imminently,” as it could take Ladyville police two to three hours before a mobile police unit could get to Crooked Tree to transfer detainees.