On Thursday, June 25, 2026, senior law enforcement investigators in Guyana confirmed that a serving Guyana Police Force constable has admitted to carrying out the premeditated killing of a 26-year-old Cuban national working in the country’s public health sector.
Twenty-year-old Randy Thomas, the suspect in the case, laid out a detailed timeline of his actions to investigators, confirming the killing was planned in advance ahead of the fatal encounter. According to Thomas’s confession, he purchased rope from a local Chinese-run supermarket in his home village of Mahaica, located on Guyana’s East Coast Demerara, days before the planned meeting with the victim, Dailen Paneque Gómez.
The pair arranged to meet on June 18, 2026, the same day Gómez disappeared while en route to her scheduled shift at the Mon Repos Health Centre. After meeting in the community of Enmore, the pair traveled together in Thomas’s personal vehicle to the remote Enmore Backdam area. Thomas told investigators that a casual discussion in the car quickly escalated into a heated argument, claiming Gómez became furious and attacked him before he killed her.
In his confession, Thomas described the chilling details of the murder: he placed a teddy bear against Gómez’s head before firing an unlicensed firearm to kill her. After the shooting, he used the pre-purchased rope to bind her body, dragged the remains into a dense thicket of bushes in the backdam, and left the corpse hidden there. Following the murder, Thomas systematically disposed of all evidence linking him to the crime:
He threw the murder weapon, an unregistered gun, into separate bushes near the backdam, discarded the teddy bear along the access road leading to the remote area, tossed Gómez’s mobile phone and the spent bullet casing over a bridge in the Unity community on East Coast Demerara, and returned to his Mahaica residence to clean every trace of evidence from his vehicle using hand sanitizer.
Gómez was officially reported missing to authorities on June 19, one day after her disappearance. Following Thomas’s arrest and confession, he led law enforcement officers directly to the thicket where he had dumped her body, closing a key gap in the missing person investigation that quickly turned into a homicide probe.
The case has sent shockwaves through Guyana, drawing attention to the safety of foreign healthcare workers serving in local public health facilities and raising questions about oversight of serving police personnel accused of violent crime.