I found this article depressing...
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_news?id=161509837He was the first to die that day 19 years ago during the Jamaat-al-Muslimeen's coup attempt, but SRP Solomon McLeod's death has been all but forgotten.
At his grave site yesterday at Indian Walk Village near Princes Town, no one went to pay their respects at his tombstone.The annual ritual by officers of the Princes Town Police Station to place a wreath and say a prayer at his grave ended four years ago. A plaque remembering how he died was the project of a nearby secondary school.At his home nearby, not a call came to his mother to offer a word of comfort or condolence.The last McLeod's mother, Marjorie, heard from the State was the year her son died - and it was to reimburse her the cost of the funeral-$5,000.
McLeod was 23 at the time he died. He was at the gates to Police Headquarters in Port of Spain on the evening of July 27, 1990, firing on a car filled with coup members and explosives.
The terrorists killed him, drove over his body and detonated the bomb. The fire consumed McLeod's body and the building. What remained of his body was retrieved after the surrender six days later.
McLeod was one of 24 people to die in the incident. He died defending his country.
He was a bachelor working as the breadwinner, the last of his mother's six children.
The people who killed McLeod were all freed.
Last week, former prime minister Arthur NR Robinson renewed the national debate calling for a Commission of Enquiry into who were involved and what led to the staging of the coup attempt.
McLeod's mother holds the view of some citizens.She said yesterday ,"Mr Robinson was in office at that time, and then was the time to launch that (enquiry). But it's is years past now. Lots of the people who were there are dead." McLeod said she was the one who commuted from her small wooden home at Ramdhanie Road to Teteron Barracks, Chaguaramas, for the trial of the 114 insurrectionists.
"I don't want to go through that again," she said.
Marjorie McLeod, 70, said she often thought about why the State had turned its back on families of the victims.
"Something is very wrong with our country. They told me then I wouldn't need a lawyer, that they would help me. I never got nothing. In other places they would have seen about people."
Yesterday, McLeod said she planned to stay in bed, read her Bible and think nothing about her son.
The memories returned, however, and she cried. "This is a terrible situation to reflect upon. But the doctor told me it is something I will live with until death," she said.
