A 22-year-old woman who stabbed her husband to death was on Friday charged for manslaughter and granted $200,000 bail.
Lakeisha Garnett appeared at the No.51 Magistrate’s Court before Magistrate Rabindranauth Singh; she is accused of stabbing to death, 25-year-old Jason Bownath, her common-law husband on January 1, 2023, at their Princetown, Corriverton, Berbice house.
She was not required to plead to the charge and is expected to return to court on February 27, 2023. The woman did not have legal representation.
According to relatives, Bownath, a welder, was stabbed in his chest with two knives by 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. Beck said she rushed outside when she saw her son hunched over by the doorway.
“He collapsed on the concrete and there she was standing with two knives ‘perched’ in her hand,” Beck recalled.
The man was rushed to the Skeldon Public Hospital by his sister; he was transferred to the New Amsterdam Hospital and died while receiving treatment there.
