Saturday 3 March 2012

EVERYBODY HAS A STORY TO TELL, All You Need To Do is: ((( Listen )))


14 year old Jermaine and his 10
year old brother, Rahem at
Alpha Boys Home
in 2006, four years after being
placed there by authorities for
their safety. Their mother had
repeatedly endangered them
by sending and taking them on
the streets with her to beg to feed
their family. They  had been their
family's only source of income
and were not attending school.
In 2003, one (1) year after entering journalism full time, I won the Press Association of Jamaica's Investigative Journalist/Reporter of the Year Award for a series of articles I had written the year before. The reports, published in the Sunday Herald Newspaper where I worked at the time, looked at a spate of cold-blooded murders which had occurred in Kingston that included the murder of defenceless women and children in late 2002 and early 2003.

Those killed included, two twin sisters nicknamed SILK & SATIN in the PNP garrison community of  Rema (which was Omar Davies' constituency at the time) and their 8-month pregnant 15 year old sister and her unborn child.

The morning of the triple murder when the photographer and I arrived Rema, the mangled bodies of the two young girls (about 3 years old) were lying on a blood soaked mattress in a one room board house in a tenement yard overflowing with gawking onlookers.