Family Mourns Death of Burn Victim Dawn Bernard

Tonight, the family of sixty-year-old Dawn Bernard is still grappling with her tragic death after she was set on fire by her common-law husband, Frederick Wagner last week. Bernard, a school warden at St. Luke Methodist Primary School, was a well-loved member of her community and is grieved by family, friends, and neighbors. Her death is another heartbreaking case of domestic violence in Belize and marks the thirteenth femicide reported this year. We spoke with her cousin, Suzette Marsden who explained how the family is still struggling to come to terms with her tragic death.

 

ASP Stacy Smith, Staff Officer

“ On Wednesday twelfth November, 2025, an investigator attached to the gender-based violence response and investigation unit of the Belize Police Department, formerly arrested and charged Frederick Wagner, a thirty-five-year-old Belizean of Lakeview Street Belize City for the crimes of attempted murder and use of deadly means of harm. These arrests follow an investigation which commence on tenth November, sometime after eight p.m., when officers who were patrolling on Lakeview Street observe a female who was later identified to be sixty-one-year-old Dawn Bernard, the common law wife of Wagner exiting a property on Lakeview Street with significant burns to her body. Bernard was ferried to the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital for treatment, and Wagner was detained and subsequently charged in light of utterance made by Ms. Bernard.”

 

Voice of: Suzette Marsden, Cousin of Deceased

“ I live next door so I gone tell my family da front. Well my neighbor halla fi me, but my cousin, she da mi wa nice person. You know when you go out with she, you wa have fun. That da one thing with she. When time you go out with she and wa man want dance with she, she mek you know you have to spend pan everybody. She da mi wa nice person. But when it come to respect, you have to got real manners when you come round she. She really touching, she easy fi get upset, but she da mi wa nice person. I used to always tell my cousin, just leff the bwai lone. Move with your life. Life goes on.”

 

Britney Gordon

“How do you think that the wider community remembers her?”

 

Voice of: Suzette Marsden

“As always big mouth Dawn, da how everybody knows she as. Becauseh she like mek noise. But from since that happened, like the neighbor just who just quiet because you could always know when she di come because she mek lotta noise.”