Those killed included two twin sisters nicknamed SILK & SATIN in the People's National Party's (PNP) garrison community of Board Villa (which was Omar Davies' constituency at the time) and their 8-months pregnant young mother and her unborn child.
The morning when I and Ricardo Makyn, a photographer who also worked at the Sunday Herald newspaper at the time, arrived in the community, the mangled bodies of the two young girls (about 3 years old) were laying on a blood soaked mattress in a one room board house in a tenement yaad overflowing with gawking onlookers.
Their mother lay spread-eagled on the bed which was really an uncovered mattress, dark with sweat and stains from over use. Robbed of final dignity in death, her once swollen belly reduced to a mass of twisted, bloodied flesh where her once alive and unborn baby had been. The gun men had turned their high powered weapons directly on her belly and emptied it into her after kicking off the flimsy door as she slept with her two toddlers.
The bullets aimed at the mother must have killed the two sisters in one fell swoop, or, the gunmen fired in a careless arc and just killed everyone within the unforgiving range of his high powered weapon. Word circulating was that he had come to settle a score with her children's father who had fled the community, so, sadly as has become common place in Jamaica, a punishing vendetta of death and mayhem is visited on innocent and often unsuspecting, vulnerable people who become guilty only by association no matter how slight. A bad man when threatening someone to try to keep them in line will often make utter the Psalmic decree that if he has to raise his machine, not even the dog or roach in the fateful yard would be spared. In Jamaica this is cloaked in the dark idiom or Proverb: " If yuh kaan ketch Qaakie.. yuh ketch him shut!" (shirt)
That morning so many years ago, as the community teemed with people from within and nearby areas who had come to try to get a glimpse of the three bodies, I spied men from the community with high powered weapons restlessly pacing on the high-rise apartment buildings. The heads of some of them were barely visible above sand bags they had piled in front of them as protection as they poked their rifles over and between them.
As the Sunday Herald photographer, Ricardo Makyn and I made our way through the throng of people who kept streaming into the community, having concluded our information gathering, I kept scanning the faces around me. As I made wide visual sweeps, I whispered quietly to him: "What if the killers are here among us? I would love to know what could cause a gunman to kill children and a pregnant lady like that!"
In my mind, I had moved beyond the WHO, WHAT, WHERE & WHEN of route reporting to the ((( WHY ))) which embodies INVESTIGATIVE journalism. Yes, the murders where continuing ... But I wanted to know ((( WHY!??))) Poor Ricardo, Anxious to get out with his life and limb intact, begged me to be quiet and 'come on!" LOL. He added: "Andrea you really believe say a gunman ago talk to you bout him deeds? You madd!!" I did keep quiet, but my mind would not shut down. My parting shot to him was: "You know, TOO often journalists assume that they WON'T get certain information if they ask, My job is to ASK! Let them tell me no or don't answer. Did you know that some of these killers are dying for someone to ask them why they do these things? But because everyone feel they WON'T answer, they NEVER get a chance to say!"
SO I went back to The Sunday Herald, where I was working at the time. Filed my who killed who story, but my mind NEVER RESTED.
A few weeks after, I was back in that area.. a few roads down, talking to relatives of a grandmother whose weeks old baby had been shot and killed while he was in her arms, (I think the mother of the child survived). That killing was reprisal for the Satin & Silk's and their Mother's and unborn sibling's death. So yuh know say di ting get ((( TUN UpPPP!)) --- A few weeks after, the area war extended across King Street to the Fringes of Fletcher's Land. A 12-year old boy had been killed while he sat getting a hair cut in a barber chair. A single bullet went through the back of his head and exited through his forehead.
It was theorized that his was a random killing.. a stray bullet fired by feuding gunmen from the neighbouring communities.. If it did (( tun uppPP b4.. that BUCK IT!!)) Now Fletchers Land... a tightly packed hand middle of a COMMUNITY squeezed between North and King Streets in Down Town Kingston was dragged into the mushrooming war.
The war ballooned to include Gold Smith Villa in August Town.. as men from the by now EXTREMELY tense community had tried to seek refuge in the hills behind the University of the West Indies in Mona. But their rivals found them and early one morning while they slept. Three men, members of one family, a son, his father and uncle I believe, were all shot to death in their 2-room board house.
The ((( WHYYY!!??))) I was carrying around in my head, by that time had reached deafening decibels. After partially viewing the bodies that lay scattered in morbid abandon on the dirty board flooring in the house.. I did what had become customary for me at these scenes, I started looking around, mapping out the place. My eyes hungry for more, for some sign of something that would help me make sense of all these senseless killings, ALL within a ONE MONTH time frame.
I walked to the top of a small incline a little way above the house and stopped at a Y junction in the road in front of a wiry black youth who was sitting on some blocks his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep and God knows what else. Mi hail him (I said hi to him) and started a disarming conversation which led to the most chilling confessions I have ever heard as a crime reporter. He told me his name was Fidel and that he got the name after he was sent to Cuba in the 1970s to be trained by the then, Michael Manley-led PNP government.
By now, Mi beg him move over and kotch pon di blocks dem wid him! (I asked him to move over a little bit so I could sit beside him on the concrete blocks on which he was sitting). I didn't even bother with my note book, my selective memory that has served me well, kicked in. I almost couldn't believe my ears... he was hungry to share his knowledge. He NEEDED to unburden himself to some one, and I had NOWHERE else to be! The Sunday Herald is ONLY published on Sundays! MY story about who got killed and wondering who had killed them could wait! Here was a tortured self-confessed guerrilla (street soldier) NEEDING TO TALK! I GREW ABOUT THREE MORE EARS! And mi not even a joke!! (I was not even kidding!)
So like too long time bredren and sistren, (friends) we sat and reasoned (talked) and God is soo good, no one disturbed us or came close. All activities and focus were centred around the death/crime scene several yards down the road.
Fidal talked and talked and talked. And I listened and listened and Listened.
He told me about how he was recruited and sent to Cuba to train in guerilla warfare and how he came back to Jamaica after his training ended and started utilizing his improved gun toting and killing skills when required. He spoke about an underground cocaine industry in Jamaica where Police men use inner-city (ghetto) youths as drug runners and how those police officers would come to the community to collect agreed sums of as much as JA$30,000 per month to pay their mortgages and loan payments for high end motor vehicles.
"All when we no make much money on the streets we have to find it to give them," Fidel told me, his voice weary, his eyes vacant. "And you can't tell them nuttin! Dem naah teck no talk! Is either them money or you life! And when dem kill you fi dem coke, dem plant the coke they gave you to sell and the gun they also gave as protection on you! And say you are an illegal drug runner killed in a shoot out with police!"
Sounding trapped, Fidel lamented: "Mi have a brand new queen size bed inna mi house and you know how long mi no sleep een deh!? Mi haffi a keep watch a night time and move from one yaad to the next."
He eased up his shirt and showed me an angry scar in his side where he said a policeman's bullet was still lodged. He said he still walks with a limp after he fractured his leg when he jumped a high wall in a bid to escape cops pursuing him.
It appeared that with the deaths of the three men in his community who were still laying prostrate just a few short steps away and the deaths of others in similar manner in recent months, Fidel felt his days were numbered and he NEEDED to tell all or MOST of what he knew.
Secrets can burden a man when he thinks he is headed to his grave, they can slow him down, especially if he is anxious for the misery of his life to end as soon as possible, just to get some measure of peace. When a young man volunteers himself for death mentally because his everyday social existence has become unbearable and the powers set up to protect him are the ones forcing him to his untimely mental and physical demise, that kind of unsettling truth is a heavy burden to bear. It is a burden I have carried with me since 2003 when he asked me to help him share it by opening up and being vulnerable as the air around us reeked of recent death, fresh grief, lingering gun powder and fear. My editor at the time (Desmond Richards), told me not to include Castro's heavy confession in the article I would later write about the triple murder, as he said while what Catro shared was common street knowledge and talk, it could not be corroborated and was dangerous territory for the news paper to tread for other obvious reasons.
Fidel confessed that he was only one of several persons sent to Cuba by the then Michael Manley-led PNP administration as a move to equip an informal, deadly ghetto army and implied that these guerrillas, those who were still alive, were all a part of the mix that was creating the cauldron of seemingly senseless murders.
This would not be the first time I had arrived at a crime scene or to an assignment and successfully sniff out the REAL story that most times was never front and centre, but lingered on the fringes of restless and curious crowds that usually gather to stare in morbid fascination and comment incredulously on the heinousness of the killings and or intermittently wail and wallow in grief when the losses managed to penetrate the thick veneer of emotional numbness which usually sets in when senseless bloodshed becomes the norm in those communities.
As Castro held me captive with his confessions... he became bolder in what he shared because I was giving him room to express himself and it was obvious I believed what he was saying, as outrageous as the claims might have seemed. Before I left him that day he offered to take me to show me a secret cache of guns that was being held in informal storage that he said would cause even more blood shed and mayhem than what was on the streets at the time. He said those weapons were much more powerful and deadly than the ones in circulation. "When dem gun deh touch road, police nah go able fi manage!" He stated emphatically intimating that the illegal guns were capable of out gunning law enforcement. My editor also forbade me from going to Mona to meet with Castro the Saturday morning as I had promised him I would so he could show me the cache of guns and even snap photos of them. My editor said it was way too dangerous for me and that as a journalist, there are some things that I will have to leave on the threshing floors of confessions disguised as confidences shared when secrets got too heavy and fear overpowered the need to maintain stoic silences embedded in inner cities' anti-snitch culture which is sometimes the last protective shield that poor people of Jamaica have against a KNOWN CORRUPT POLICE FORCE.
I left Jamaica for Canada eight years ago and since then, I have listened in horror as the number of killings continue to climb and the methods of murder become more and more heinous. Guns are still among the key weapons of choice but be-headings are commonplace and for a while, the killers were video taping the murders and circulating them via social media platforms, especially whats app.
Where back then the murder of old people, women and children were fewer, in the more recent past and presently, the gunmen on the island have been following through on their threats to leave no one alive when they hit a target location, threats which remained idle for years and rang hollow, serving only to verbally drive fear in whoever they were trying to intimidate.
Reggae and dancehall music which were once effective means of channeling positive messages of hope and peace to the Jamaican masses; momentarily lost its traction and impact with the loss of a few key reggae and dance hall artistes who were imprisoned for various crimes. The 'messages in the music', especially the dancehall genre, plummeted and took with it, the already precariously perched social stability in Jamaica. However, one of the missing MessenJAHS; Mark Myrie, aka Buju Banton, returned to the local music scene in December of 2018 with his release from US prison after serving the mandatory portion of a 10 year drug trafficking sentence.
With Buju's re-entry, things, which had begun to take a marginal, northern climb with the emergence of some new Reggae artistes with conscious messages like Chronixx, Portoje and others in the Del-La Vega City based Zinc Fence Records crew, things have somewhat stabilized. This, along with the core of conscious reggae singers who have remained steadfast in their positive musical focus provide HOPE in the future of REGGAE and our Island Nation.
Buju's Long Walk to Freedom (#LWTFT ) World Tour which kicked off March 16, 2019 at a filled to capacity National Stadium in the island's capital Kingston, is wrapping up the Caribbean leg and headed to Europe this, the artiste's birthday month (July). With his current trajectory, I anticipate that LWTFT will be headed to Africa after Europe.
However, MUSIC is just ONE of the tools that can be effectively used to counter negative societal influences. Government's social and economic policies are the frame work which these cultural ambassadors NEED to build a successful social Renaissance that Jamaica, a nation parched for PEACE, needs to survive the current crime blight and bloodshed.
NATURE and the UNIVERSE have ways of BALANCING themselves... as that sometimes slow but inevitable AXIS continues to turn, we trust JAH/GOD/YAWEH for the lasting solutions JAMAICA NEEDS. The Struggle Continues... 'Til Shiloh
