The brother of Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) North Abaco candidate Renardo Curry yesterday came to his defense after their stepmother charged the PLP with victimizing their late father, something she claimed ultimately caused his death. Phillipa Rolle-Curry, who said she married Pastor Michael Lucian Curry in 1994, said his death in 2010 was the result of years of stress following his unjust termination from the Bahamas Agricultural and Industrial Corporation (BAIC) in 2003. Shortly after Rolle-Curry made the explosive remarks at a Guardian Radio and Cable 12 town meeting in Marsh Harbour, Abaco on Thursday, Kermit Curry came up behind her and tried to snatch an obituary out of her hand.

The program went to a break and when it returned Rolle-Curry and Kermit Curry had left the hall. However, the PLP released a statement on Kermit Curry's behalf. "In nothing short of sheer, crafted, political witchery my brother Renardo was...mischaracterized by our late father's widow," Curry said. Curry said his father would never have agreed with what his widow did at the meeting. "He was a proponent of free will and woefully opposed strong-arming free thinking moral agents to support agendas contrary to their belief," said Curry. "Our support of the PLP is the celebration of choice that our father so adamantly believed in.

"We call on his widow to do the right and decent thing in honoring our father's legacy and belief, the man she purports to love and not allow [cheap political brownie] points to be the hallmark of his memorial." Rolle-Curry denies political theatrics When contacted yesterday Rolle-Curry said she was not in Abaco with an agenda, but merely visiting her lat husband's grave. When asked what happened between her and Kermit, she said, "I never had anything to say to Kermit." "I was to a town meeting; Kermit was not there. Kermit was in his bed I was told, sleeping.

"He let the PLP people wake him up out of his bed and [told him to come] to the meeting. I invited he and Renardo throughout the 17 years of my married life to Freeport to visit their father on several occasions, especially on Father's Day [and] they never came," she claimed. "But you could wake up out of your bed in the night to come to a town meeting for what people told you and gossip?" In an interview Thursday night, Curry all but disowned his stepmother saying it would take "the power of God" for him to forgive her.

Rolle-Curry said she will always love her stepson. "My relationship with Renardo has always been like a mother and a son and right now, today, you can tell Renardo, he says he finds it hard in his heart to forgive me, but tell Renardo that I forgave him, 17, 18, 19, 20 years ago and I still love him today," she said. "He is still my son. I never called him stepson, I said 'my son'. "He could call me stepmom now because he showing off with the news and the PLP people, he could do that. "But I think when you marry a man and you meet him with children, the children become your children."

The candidate accused his stepmother of politicizing the death of his father. But she said she was merely highlighting the years of pain he suffered at the hands of the PLP. "If Renardo was close to his father the way he was supposed to be he would have known exactly what was going on in his father's life," she said. "If you were a son and a party victimized your father, giving him his final paycheck and dismissal letter and he took it with a heart attack...and that happened to your father... would you follow the party that crippled your father and caused his death?" Rolle-Curry also took issue with Curry's claim that he did not know of his father's alleged victimization. "In 2007, the FNM used his father's name as a victim of victimization on the campaign trail," she said. "Renardo knew because he and his father talked about it. We talked about it as a family. So how come [he] doesn't know and the world knows? "Were you (Curry) keeping in touch with your father?"

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