The mother of four-year-old Amarah Lallitte said she is shocked over her daughter’s death, as the suspect was never violent.

Police reports say the mother and a male relative were involved in an altercation at their home on Fifth Street, Arouca in the night on April 8.

She escaped and went to the nearby Arouca Police Station to report the incident.

She returned home escorted by police and discovered her daughter’s lifeless body in the house. The child had been beheaded. Police found her head in a barrel in the house.

The suspect was still at the scene and was detained by police.

Speaking with the media at the Forensic Science Centre in St James, Amarah's mother recalled making the difficult decision to leave her daughter at home with the suspect while she went to get help.

She said Lallitte was on the bed watching her tablet when the suspect attacked her and tried to drag her into a room.

“She thought we were playing, so she was laughing. When I called her to come, she was not coming, she just stayed on the bed. So I had no choice.

“I had to try and get away from his grip and go to the station with the anticipation that the police would have reached there in time to save her.”

By the time she returned, it was too late.

She said in the four years she has known the suspect, she never noticed any violent tendencies. She said he also never displayed any signs of suffering from a mental illness.

“He never showed any indication of being, I don't want to say schizo, but that's how he was acting. Like if he was a different person and different personalities (were) talking to me. I never experienced that with him. He never showed me that type of tendency.”

She was referring to schizophrenia, a brain disorder which can cause delusions, hallucinations and disorganised speech.

“He was never an angry person or a violent person, so when I discovered that he killed her, I was shocked.”

She said the suspect was always protective of Amarah.

“I didn't think he would have done her that. He never showed any kind of violence towards Amarah. He would have killed for Amarah. He was so protective of her. So this is a shocking blow for me.”

Lallitte’s mother described her as a loving child and the “light of the room.

“Everybody loved this child. I can say nothing bad about her. I don't know what would make him want to harm that child so much. She was a darling. She was everybody’s darling.”

Speaking on Ian Alleyne's Crime Watch programme in the night on April 9, Lallitte's father Shannon Lallitte said he had not seen his daughter in more than three years.

He said this was a result of an ongoing dispute with the child's mother.

"The police told me don't come back here until allyuh settle that (dispute)... I was denied access to the child almost four years."

Meanwhile, the Trinidad and Tobago Council of Evangelical Churches condemned the murder and expressed “profound shame and horror at the barbarity inflicted upon this innocent child.”

It said, in a media release, that the death of Lallitte, al