The 25-year-old woman who stabbed her partner to death on New Year’s Day did so after he slapped her several times during an argument over beers.
According to relatives, 25-year-old Jason Bownath, a welder of Princetown, Corriverton, Berbice was stabbed in his chest with two knives by Lakeisha Garnett. Garnett and Bownath had been living together for six years and have two young children, aged 5 and 6.
Sharon Beck, the dead man’s mother, told the News Room that the couple and other relatives were drinking next door when Garnett’s brother bought some beers for his wife. The brother’s wife did not want the beers and Garnett started arguing with her brother and told him to return the beers. She also reportedly tried to prevent anyone from drinking the beers, including Bownath.
Bownath then told Garnett to desist and threatened to slap her if she continued but she responded and said she would “run a knife through him.”
“She started quarreling and saying don’t trouble the girl things [beers] and you will have to pay for it. My son tried to quiet her and she get up and she went home and she turned and tell him ‘you follow me and you will see what I will do with you’,” Beck explained.
The grieving woman said she lives in the upper flat of the house and Bownath and his family lived in the lower flat. She was home peeling garlic when she heard her son calling out to her just after midnight on New Year’s. Beck said she rushed out because she thought something had happened to the children but she saw her son hunched over by the doorway and asked him what was wrong.
“He collapsed on the concrete and there she was standing with two knives ‘perched’ in her hand,” Beck recalled.
The dead man’s mother further explained that blood started to flow profusely after her son fell and she raised an alarm.
Other relatives came over, and while attempting to pick Bownath up from the floor, then they realised that he was stabbed. A neighbour rushed the man to the Skeldon Public Hospital. He was later transferred to the New Amsterdam where he died while receiving treatment.
Bownath worked in Georgetown and returned home to spend the holidays with his family.
The incident has left family members shocked and Beck said while the couple had their differences over the years, it never escalated to such violence. Beck said her son was loving and hardworking.
“I am leaving the matter with the Police,” the woman said.
Garnett remains in police custody.
