’I USED to tell she, ’Dorna that man is a police, what if he go and get his service revolver and kill you and then kill himself.’’

Jacqueline George did not know that three days later, her stepdaughter, Dorna Noel, 45, would be killed at her workplace in the same fashion she had warned her about that Sunday night.

George invited the Express into her Malabar home yesterday, where she recalled the last few days of her stepdaughter’s life before her live-in lover, acting corporal Sean James, shot her dead.

’On Saturday night, I got a call from her, asking me if I was home. I said yes, and then she asked if I could come and pick her up now. I asked what happened, and she said she just had a falling out with him. So I went to her home (at Harper Lane, D’abadie) and took her up... he did put a cutlass to her neck, he choked her, he stripped her,’ George said, adding that Noel had decided she could no longer live with James.

’She decided that he had to go. The house is she own, so she tell him he have to leave. The whole day next day, while she was by me, she could not even swallow. Her neck was swollen because he choke she,’ George said.

It was that night that George said she warned Noel about the dangers of associating herself with James. A few days later, George said she had received a call from James. She said she missed the call but James had left a voice message, telling her he wanted her to tell Noel he wanted to meet her.

She told Noel, who said she was afraid but if he had his daughter with him she was willing to talk with him. So he got his daughter, and they went to the Trincity Mall, where he said he was sorry and that he was wrong and that he would go for counselling and whatever.

Noel told him then that she was scared of him, and that she had decided to call off the relationship.

’You go your way and I will go my way, and that was the end of that conversation. That night, the Tuesday night, she said someone was in her yard and she knows it was somebody who she knew because the dog wasn’t barking. So she thought it was him and called his phone. It didn’t ring, it went straight into voicemail, so then she decided she would call the police.

’At 11 o’clock, she call the police; by half past one, they call and say they could not find the house. But she then see the lights coming up the street. They tell she come by the gate, and she say she not coming by the gate unless they reach there, because it had somebody in the yard. When they came she told them thanks because whoever it was had left, and the police speed off and gone,’ George said.

Twelve hours later, Noel was dead. She had gone to her place of work-at the office of family doctor Wahid Mohammed on the Eastern Main Road, in Curepe. The office was closed at the time, as Mohammed was said to have been in Canada.

Around 1.45 on Wednesday afternoon, James reportedly went into the building. Police later found both Noel and James with gunshot wounds to the head. Noel died on the spot, while James later died at hospital.

George said she was contacted by Dr Mohammed, and he requested that the funeral be delayed as he was still in Canada.

The funeral service for Noel will take place on Tuesday at 10 a.m. at Allen’s Funeral Home in Arima. James will be buried today.