Family still critical of police
While Patrick Jones was questioning the dead man’s relatives in Cayo, I spoke to other family members in Belize City, where they had come to identify the body at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital morgue. Not surprisingly, their disdain for the authorities had not been diminished by Sunday’s events.
A grieving Sarita Bennett, the mother of Wensworth “Winty” Mangar says she is terribly upset about the way her son was killed and believes it was the system that failed, resulting in the mistaken release and subsequent death of her twenty three year old son.
Sarita Bennett, Mother
“Well, I feel very bad about it, you know. Because as I could see, he was in the prison. They release him from the prison, then from that time they released him from the prison he went at large. So then we couldn’t get contact with him to say well, I could speak to my son and say well, son I want to take you in or something like that. I couldn’t have words with him. But yet they still harassing us every three days in a week in 1997, practically about nine months for the whole year 1997? they have us harassing.”
Bennett says the family is also upset that the police as yet have not informed them of the details surrounding Mangar’s death. Bennett says she was attending mass in Roaring Creek when she first heard about the shooting? that was three hours after her son was killed.
Sarita Bennett
“I don’t know why they didn’t come and tell me something. I am the fittest one they should have come and say well Miss Mangar, well your son, your son is dead. They haven’t come and tell me anything. They just bring? When I heard they say in the radio, they have him here in the Belize mortuary. Then I as the mother, they haven’t told me anything.”
When we caught up with the Mangar family outside the city’s morgue
they were complaining that they were not allowed to see the body. When the family was finally given permission to view the body, they told us that Mangar had received multiple gunshots to his upper chest. While our cameras were allowed inside the morgue, we were only able to get head shots of Mangar. According to his brother, Harry Mangar, several hours after the shooting he along with his other brother were rounded up in Hopkins Village and jailed Sunday afternoon because the police were not sure if the right Mangar brother was killed.
Harry Mangar, Brother
“We were harassed just yesterday evening about two thirty, me and my brother who was, by the name of Roy was in when we were in Hopkins trying to catch the bus to come to Roaring Creek up to my mom and check out what?s going on, you know.”
Q: “This was after you all heard about the shooting?”
Harry Mangar
“Right, this was after the shooting, this was far after the shooting and the police and other guys came up and harassed us, handcuffed us and damaged some on my hand, got blisters and stuff like that, kicked us up and stuff like that.”
Sarita Bennett
“Well everybody will say he is a murderer, but we cannot say and the police they cannot say. The only person who can say is my Lord. He is the only one that can say that because I cannot say and they cannot say that either.”
It is expected that Tuesday morning the body of Wensworth Mangar will be transported up to Roaring Creek when he will finally be laid to rest.
Viewers should note that although the media and police have been referring to him as Winsworth Mangar, the correct name, according to the family, is “Wensworth” with an “e”. For the record, police allege that he was involved in the murder of anthropologist Byron Foster and retired public officer Joseph Bulwer.
