Jail for man who chopped, stabbed his ex-girlfriend

A man has been convicted in three separate cases in which he landed blows on his former girlfriend using different sharp instruments.

Between last week and this week, Vinsley Dublin, 45, went through trials for two of the cases and pleaded guilty to one.

Two of the cases involved unlawful, malicious wounding charges and the other an assault causing actual bodily harm.

Dublin did not offer any evidence in his defence, but instead he questioned his ex-girlfriend, Eden Browne, at length when she was on the stand.

“What is wrong with you? What is the matter with you?” Senior Prosecutor Adolphus Delplesche asked Dublin after the second conviction. “You can’t be taking cutlass and just wielding” it at persons, the prosecutor told him.

“Is a tree you chopping down?” the prosecution stated derisively. “Vinsley no,” he said, adding that the court couldn’t accept that.

Last Friday, Vinsley was convicted for chopping Browne on her hand with a cutlass on Sunday March 10, 2019 and for chopping Browne in the head on August 26, 2019.

On March 10, Browne, who works as a security guard at the Questelles Government School was at work when Dublin came there and started cursing her. She asked him to leave, and Dublin responded by taking out a cutlass, and showing it to her. Browne phoned the police, and they responded to the call, and warned him to desist from harassing Browne, as well as trespassing on the school premises.

Later that day Browne was walking on the Mahaut public road when she met the defendant there. He proceeded to pull a cutlass from his backpack and attempted to strike her. She held up her hand at the same time, trying to block the hit, and the cutlass landed on her left hand.

On August 26, Browne was at home with the door open. Dublin came and met one of his friends standing there, and told him to “make a rounds,” which the friend did. He then went inside and started cursing with Browne, telling her she has another man. She defended herself, but Dublin pulled a cutlass and struck her in the head. She ran into the bedroom and said that he was trying to force his way into the room. The police met her at the house in Campden Park, and took her to get medical attention.

Dublin claimed that it was Browne and another former boyfriend of hers who made him start getting back into trouble again. This was after his 15 previous convictions of a “serious nature” were noted. He asked that Chief Magistrate Rechanne Browne give him a fine to pay.

“It wasn’t a scrape you know,” the magistrate pointed out to him, with the medical report before her. The ex-girlfriend sports a scar in the middle of her head from this attack.

“This is a very serious matter for which you are here and I’m not going to trivialize it at all,” the magistrate stated.

“This is a cutlass…a woman, and I should say violence is not accepted, either directed at the woman, or directed at the man,” she stated, when Dublin started saying that Eden was really the one who pulled the cutlass on him and then he took it away and chopped her.

“Suppose she had fallen dead? Okay…you don’t know. You do not know what the impact of the cutlass would have been. Suppose she had fallen dead? You would have had a whole different charge,” Browne told him.

This Tuesday, Dublin was again convicted, this time for assaulting Eden, and causing her actual bodily harm in an incident that occurred on June 14, 2018. On this occasion, Eden was walking on the road in Kingstown, and Dublin came up. He asked her to go to country with him, and she refused, she recalled while on stand in court. When giving evidence, Eden looked at the wall of court, until something that Dublin said or asked appeared to anger her and then she would look his way. She said that Dublin took $800 out of her bag on that morning, and eventually the two started arguing.

Dublin took a red/black handled scissors and stabbed the palm of Eden’s hand. They were then on their way to take her to a doctor, when “he end up and give me a cuff,” the former girlfriend explained.

Dublin seemed focused on the money, and never asked Eden about the stabbing.

For the two incidents where Dublin chopped Eden with a cutlass he received a total of two and a half years incarceration. For the assault, he was sentenced to 11 months in prison, to run concurrently to this.