Men injured at party

by Taranjah Yaw Fri, Sept 24, 2010

A Bequia man is in Trinidad trying desperately to save his right leg after it was almost severed at the knee around 4:45 on the afternoon of Sunday, September 19, at a beach party at Bequia.{{more}}

Carlton Ollivierre flew to the twin-island republic Monday to be tended by orthopedic surgeons.

Ollivierre, 37, an employee of Tradewinds Cruise Club, Inc., a luxury sailing yacht charter company that operates in the Grenadines, was at the company’s annual beach party on Princess Margaret Beach when he was attacked.

He was immediately flown to the mainland on one of his company’s planes which was in Bequia at the time.

Jillian, Ollivierre’s wife of 15 years, told SEARCHLIGHT that they were at the party with three of their children when a man approached her husband and slapped him. Jillian said that her husband reacted by hitting the man in the face with a beer bottle from which he was drinking.

She said at that point she got in the middle and the man pushed her then left.

Jillian said that about an hour after the incident, the man returned accompanied by Garnet “Bughouse” Shallow and began looking at them.

“My husband said, ‘I don’t like how they looking at me,’ and I told him to let us go home, but his boss Edith told us to stay everything will be okay,” a distraught Jillian said.

Jillian further related that her husband had stopped drinking after the incident and they were standing around a table when Shallow came up behind her husband and chopped him on his right leg around the knee area.

“Carlton tried to run after him but fell down in blood,” Jillian said.

“How could he do that to Carlton with his three children right there?” Jillian moaned on the ferry on her way to see her husband in Kingstown on Sunday. Accompanying his mother on the ferry, Jemuel Hutchins said that his step-father raised him after his father died and that he is hoping for the best.

SEARCHLIGHT visited the male surgical ward of the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital (MCMH) where we caught up with Garnet ‘Bughouse’ Shallow, 51.

He said that he went up to Ollivierre at the party and asked him why he hit the man with a bottle. Shallow said Ollivierre told him ‘I don’t want anybody to ask me anything. You want yours?’

Shallow said that he had left the party to go home when Ollivierre walked around him, so he was between Ollivierre and his crew, who were next to Ollivierre’s truck.

“I felt threatened, so I had a cutlass, and I chop him,” Shallow said.

Shallow said that he was tackled and beaten unconscious by Ollivierre’s friends and only regained consciousness at the Bequia hospital where he went unconscious again. He said he regained consciousness on the Bequia channel on a coast guard vessel on his way to the MCMH in Kingstown.

Ollivierre and Shallow were patients on the same ward until Ollivierre left for Trinidad around 2:45pm on Monday.

At press time when SEARCHLIGHT contacted the police, we were told that no one had been charged.