Last Updated on Wednesday, 7 May 2025, 21:08 by Writer
Lawyers for the family of Adriana Younge, whose body was found in a hotel pool late last month, on Wednesday, believed it was too premature to say that she died by drowning because the toxicology tests have not yet been completed.
Attorney-at-Law Dr Dexter Todd, who successfully secured a meeting with Police Commissioner Clifton Hicken on Wednesday, questioned the reason for a public pronouncement about the cause of death if the preliminary post-mortem report was unavailable.
“Won’t it not have been better to say that the entire autopsy process is incomplete and, therefore, it will be premature at this stage to pronounce on a possible cause of death?” he asked while speaking to reporters shortly after the meeting.
Mr Todd related that police said they did not know whether a sample of water or residue from the pool at the Double Day Hotel, Tuschen, East Bank Essequibo, was taken by investigators to compare it with the water that was found in the body of Adriana Younge.
“What are you matching that against? How are you doing the comparative analysis? They can’t say if any water was taken from that pool,” he said when asked by Demerara Waves Online News.
A senior police investigator did not immediately respond to a query about whether any water sample was taken from the pool.
Younge’s body was found in the pool on April 24, 2025 under a cloud of suspicion largely as a result of an erroneous official police force statement that she had been seen one day earlier entering an identifiable car.
The three foreign forensic pathologists had taken samples from Younge’s body and sent to a reputable laboratory in the United States for tests.
Dr Todd opined that that process would take a while and so the results could not be expected soon, in contrast to DNA tests which would be quicker.
Dr Todd said the police could not pronounce on the family’s desire to have a second post-mortem, but he said that would depend on the first report and the video of the first examination of the body by pathologists – Barbados-based government pathologist Dr Shubhakar Karra Paul, Dr Glenn A. Rudner who is affiliated with Mount Sinai Hospital and the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City and Trinidad and Tobago-born Chief Medical Examiner of the US State of Delaware, Dr Gary L. Collins.
“It doesn’t seem all these days after that the force is at a stage which you can either advance the investigations further or not,” he said.
The lawyer said he and his colleagues would formally request “some form” of international investigation. The family and Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton had requested a commission of inquiry.
Apart from a few discolorations on the face, the body “is not decomposed at all”.
A new date for the funeral now depended on a briefing of the family by the lawyers on the outcome of their meeting with the Police Commissioner.
The funeral was originally scheduled for May 5 but was postponed.
The family is appealing for peace and calm.
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