A follow-up to the May 19 Court date
This is McDowell's account of how he ended up here.
The people who are challenging him are portraying him as hostile and nefarious. That is not how it happened. Both he and Miss Gwenny are without guile.
He has accepted that he has lost ownership of the house, the concrete building and the land, and is not contesting this point. The lawyers have told us from the beginning that Miss Gwenny did not own the property, and so, however much she wanted to give McDowell something, she could not give what was not hers to give. Miss Marion's will gave her a lifetime tenancy only, not ownership. It is now confirmed. Now, the question is their demand for him to pay "damages and costs". We are asking for compensation for the renovations and rebuilding of the buildings and property since Hurricane Maria.
NOTE: The house and land were bought by Miss Marion. Miss Gwenny, Miss Marion's niece, came to live with her aunt when she was 5 years old. Miss Kitzia, Marion's sister, was also part of the household. McDowell lived with his mother and siblings just down the street. He was a school child when he started to work for the Peter ladies, Marion, Kitzia and Gwendolyn, and was with them all his life. Miss Marion called him "Our man in the yard". Miss Gwenny called him "My adopted son".
McDowell -
One day, during my early childhood days in Portsmouth, as I was
running along Bay Street on my way to the Portsmouth Pier, or dock, Miss Marion, who was standing on her porch, called me.
I sat down with her at her dining room table. She wrote down the names of many men from the
upper Zikack area. She asked me if I
knew these men. I told her no, but she
set me off anyway, with a bunch of newspapers, called The Star, to find these
people. Miss Alfree was the editor of the newspaper. The newspaper was 25 cents
at the time. I was paid 2 cents for each one I sold and delivered weekly. Many
people helped me along the way. This continued for months.
I don’t really remember how many years I spent delivering papers,
or polishing the floors, or picking knips and doing messages under Miss Marion’s
direction, for the family. One day, she handed me a straw lunch basket and told
me to deliver it to Miss Gwenny who was working further down Bay Street, about
3 blocks away. This became a regular
thing. I also met the other aunt, Miss Kitzia, who was not of sound mind.
Miss Gwenny was a ship agent
and owned a small craft shop on her own property. During the time I was
assisting the Peters ladies, Miss Gwenny introduced me to her brother, Mr.
Wills Kelsick. She bought agricultural produce from him to be shipped to
Antigua to a hotel. I prepared the
produce for shipping for Miss Gwenny. One evening, as I was coming home from Long
House after shipping his produce, Mr. Kelsick called me into the Douglas
Snackette. He said to his new wife, “He’s the one.” Then to me he said, “Don’t
think Gwenny can leave you anything because she is only there until she dies.”
I didn’t understand this, so I brought the remark to Miss Gwenny’s attention.
After Hurricane David, (August 25, 1979) things changed. I found a
job on a boat coming and going. These I call my sailing days.
When I was back home in Portsmouth and settled, about 1990, I
learned of the death of both aunts, Marion and Kitzia (Marion, 1988, Kitzia,
1989) and of the struggle Gwenny had to rebuild the old wooden house in the
yard next to the main house. It brought back old memories because it was a
house that was used as a shop. That’s
where I bought my Christmas supplies as a child. It was one of our most exciting Christmas
shops in Portsmouth. Miss Gwenny told me they broke it down and built another
little storeroom with the excess material salvaged from the old building, and
how she had to sell her property on Bay Street to build the concrete building. She wanted to be closer to her ailing and
aged aunts. When I arrived, Miss Gwenny
had a new craft shop on the side of the new, concrete building closest to the
house and rented out the other side.
By this time, Miss Gwenny was partially blind. She struggled with this blindness until the
end of her days, dying at 102 (2012) having come to live there from the time
she was 5 years old. During this time, the late 90s, she developed a problem with
her tenant (Roger Brewster) who was not paying his rent. This rent was her only
income to support herself and the improvements to the family home. The matter
was put in the courts by her and her brother
At that time, I was working with my sister in rented premises on
Harbour Lane Street. After Gwenny won her case against Brewster she said to me,
“The place ready, do you want it?” I took it. She rented that spot to me at
$400 a month. This is where I presently have my business, The Sagittarius 2
Reggae Bar and Grill. This enterprise is registered as La Cour Heritage.
In 1995 I had to go to St
Martin with my pregnant girlfriend and stayed a couple of months, then returned
to Portsmouth. In the later part of 1995
I had to return to St Martin to pick her up. I paid Miss Gwenny for 4 months'
advance rent. Then 2 Hurricanes, Luis and
Marilyn, category 4 hit St Martin back-to-back. I was in St. Martin. A
helicopter came from Guadeloupe to St Martin and picked up all the pregnant
women and took them to Guadeloupe. I
returned to Portsmouth to get a visa for Guadeloupe. The baby was born in Guadeloupe, September 15, 1995. We 3 (me, mother and baby) came back to Portsmouth. I reopened my business.
Miss Gwenny and I had to repair the entire backyard and the
seawall, which were severely undermined by the 2 hurricanes,
November 1, 2004: We had a major Richter scale 6 earthquake. Miss
Gwenny and I were in the house when it started to shake. Gwenny hung onto the kitchen counter and
called out to me, “Hold me, hold me “, while the house was swaying. Then she shouted, “Mother Mary! Help us!” The earthquake brought down the steeple in
the Catholic Church, the Methodist church in Portsmouth and the church in Ville
Case. It also brought down the 50-foot-long, 12-foot-high, L shaped, stone wall
between the house and the big drain on Boroughs Square. We paid men to clean up the fallen wall. We are still picking up
stones from this wall.
The Bar was not operating
well, so Miss Gwenny gave me notice and rented it to someone else and the other side to Justina De Roche for a mini mart.
They are still there. I continued to live in the family house as Miss Gwenny’s
caretaker.
During early 2007 I ran into financial difficulties and decided to
go to St. Marten. I ended up paying my debt
and returned to Dominica 2 years later (2009) to my sick mother, who died while
I was on the way home to her, only to find that Miss Gwenny was in greater
problems with the tenant who was now occupying my former space. It was then
that she appointed me her Power of Attorney so I could go to court on her
behalf. With this and her lawyer I was
able to solve the problem on her behalf. Then I started my business again. She
called me her adopted son.
Gwenny struggled to make ends meet until her death in
2012. I was looking after Miss
Gwenny and living in the house as a family member.
I heard a conversation between Mr. Kelsick and Miss Gwenny where
she told him that she must leave something for McDowell. He answered that “You can’t give something
that is not yours.” She said, “It is my house, and I can do what I want. I will make a will”. It was then that she made her will.
2004. This will was lost in Hurricane
Maria.
Miss Gwenny and I continued to uplift the estate. She wrote her second will in 2010. After
discussion and negotiation failed, I was asked to go call the Justice of the
Peace, and Mr. Morris Thomas as witnesses for Miss Gwenny when her lawyer, Para
Riviere, had finished the document and it was ready to be signed.
A point I want to make is that Miss Gwenny didn’t do this on her
own. She made her will with a
lawyer. She asked me to get the lawyer
to come to her so she could make a will.
She gave her aunt’s will to him for the information in it. At this
meeting I heard her lawyer tell her that she could sell. So that gave her the confidence to make her
will as she did. After he made her will, I was sent to call the Justice of the
Peace, Mr. Angol at the time and another good friend of the family to witness
it. After she received the will and it
was signed, she told me to take it to the registry to be registered. When I
went to the registry, they told me the will cannot be registered until her
death and to keep it in a safe place.
After her death I registered it. I don’t know if she got wrong advice.
The only other person I knew of who was close to Miss Gwenny,
beside Mr. Kelsick, was Angela Dewhurst and her husband, Peter. It was not until near the end of Miss
Gwenny’s days that I saw any other members of her family. A young lady and her husband passed on a
Sunday, quickly visited, and she left me her phone number. I called this number the morning of her
death.
The night before the burial, while I was working in the Bar, Merlin
Kelsick and Pet Savarin came and asked me for the keys to the house because
they wanted to enter the house, which was my home. Previously, I had been instructed by Miss
Gwenny, “Don’t give anybody the keys after I die and the funeral home has my
body.” I closed the Bar and came with
them to the house. I opened the door, turned on the lights and let them
in. Mr. Kelsick looked around and
started asking me questions about the house such as, “Are there any leaks in the roof?” and he was
moving around like he had already taken
over.
The next day after the burial some family members walked into the
house and started walking through the house and the yard like they were already
the owners. Some of them I only saw for the first time. I followed them into the yard. When we came back inside, Merlin Kelsick said
to me, “I will send you a letter and the tenants because I am the executor of
Gwenny’s estate.” So, I said, “you say that
you are the executor of her estate, but I am the executor of her last will and
testament. Then he jumped on his crew and said,” You guys never told me that,
and there is nothing I can do until I see this document”. Then I said, Tomorrow I will get the justice
of the peace to read her will to you.” Merlin Kelsick answered “NO NO we need
an official copy,” My answer was that I would get it from the lawyer tomorrow
and you can pick it up. They came and
they picked it up. His comment was, “Oh she left you everything….” And he said more.
A few weeks later I received the letter from Alec Lawrence at the post office
which I brought to Miss Peter’s lawyer.
There is no hostility on my part, and I have never met June
Kelsick. I do not know this person so I
couldn’t be hostile. Sometimes at night
I see people I don’t know hanging around, so I ask if they are a spy or what
they are doing there. This is not
hostility. This is protecting the
property.
It has been my home for the
last 33 years. I also have a registered business on the property. After Maria I took loans to reroofed,
renovate, rebuild, reside, and make it liveable again.
I am still paying these loans at the Credit Union and Rudolph Thomas Hardware. In
other words, I didn’t make it worse, I made it better. It is one of the old century houses on
Dominica.
From what I know about Miss Gwenny, she was not a bad
person. Whatever she did wrong wasn't willful. Like me, I thought I was safe under what she
was doing, that’s the true respect I had for the woman and her struggle. I don’t know if she thought her aunt had
brought her into the picture when she promised a quarter of the sale or lease
to her, or if she did not understand what Gwenny’s position was. I’m in the middle of what is a mystery to me.
Miss Gwenny wanted to give
me something she had worked all her life for, it just happened to be this land
compound. Everything she had has gone
into this property. Gwenny told Will
Kelsick, Marion’s executor, that she wanted to give me something. He did not
want to negotiate with her. She wasn’t left with a choice because everything
she legally owned in her lifetime was put into this property. I think the executor
could have worked something out with her because they were both beneficiaries
included in the future lease or sale of the property. Maybe she thought, as a legal
lifetime owner, she could do what she wanted, and she had a lawyer’s advice.
I am willing to answer any questions
