Senseless was how Brenda Lewis summed up the murder of her nephew Daryl Bastein, 32, after he was shot three times yesterday during an altercation over a cellphone charger. As tears flowed down her cheeks at her mother’s Quinam, Siparia, home, Lewis made an impassioned plea to the Government to reintroduce the hangman.
“They say it inhumane, but shooting somebody is not inhumane? We have to go the American way, they have the lethal injection, the lethal chair. Is the system here that have the criminals so bold, they not afraid of getting caught.” She said it was unfair that taxpayers’ money was being used to maintain convicted murderers in prison.
Describing Bastein as her brother, she said her mother Josephine, 67, took care of him after his mother died when he was just two. Although he lived alone at Ritoville, Siparia, she said he would eat his meals and bathe at his grandmother’s house and called her mom.
Recalling the incident, she said Bastein, who worked with a contractor hired by WASA, left from his grandmother’s house at Trainline Road around 7 pm and returned about 9 pm Friday. She said Bastein and a man who only began frequenting the area three weeks ago had an altercation over a cellphone charger.
“Everybody thought that finish there.” But around 5.30 am yesterday, she said Bastein was on his way to his grandmother’s house to collect lunch before going to work when the man blocked him. The two began fighting and Bastein’s friend intervened and stopped the fight. “Eyewitnesses say the guy told Darly ‘when you come up the hill you will get what coming to you.’”
When Bastein got to his uncle’s house, a short distance from his grandmother’s house, she said the man scrambled Bastein again. When the man fell on the ground, she said he pulled out a gun and shot Bastein three times in his neck, side and back. He died on the scene. “That was a senseless killing.”
And when the police arrest Bastein’s killer, she said she will not get the justice she wants. “If he get lifetime in prison, he getting three square meals. Prisoners have rights but what about the victims rights?” Jenelle Reyes, 31, who has a six-year-old son Isiah with Bastein, said although they were not together he took care of Isiah and her other son, Laurent, four.