‘Mommy, we dead now’

IT was after midnight, and she was fast asleep in her Tredegar Park, St Catherine home. Her daughter shook her awake.

“Mommy, yuh hear dat?” the little girl asked. She listened. What she heard was a half-hour long volley of gunfire interspersed with shouts of “Police, police!”   When the fire subsided and she joined the neighbours gathered in the street to investigate what happened, eight people — including an 11-year-old girl — lay dead.

The woman, whose name we are withholding for reasons related to her safety, described what she heard that night.  “It wasn’t some light weapons either,” she said. “It was some heavy-duty-sound weapons, so we had to get low.”  All the members of her household, which includes three children, took cover under beds.

“It sounded like it was everybody house on our street was getting shoot up… I was nervous and the children were bawling.”  Some of the things she remembers the children saying were: “Mommy, we dead now” and “Mommy, mek we pray”.  “We could hear talking. I heard one of the men’s voice. He was shouting “police, police!” before they go into people’s house,” she told the Sunday Observer.

“I am thinking twice about staying. I want to go but I cannot leave until I know where I am going.”  The risk residents run in leaving, she said, is that their houses will be looted in their absence.

“You will lock up your house and when you come back all your things gone. That’s what (the criminals) want. They want us to leave so they can steal our things and take over the community. That’s what happened to the people in Gravel Heights the other day,” she said, referencing a nearby community from where some residents fled because of violence.

She has, however, sent her son — a nine-year-old — to stay with his grandmother in the country, at least until the summer break is over, and her daughter is planning a similar move.

“Before him leave he wasn’t eating, he wasn’t sleeping. But now he’s happy. He’s eating again. They called to say they never know is so him can eat,” she said, laughing in spite of herself and the burden of the trauma she knows her little boy has experienced. “He says he’s not coming back.”

Her daughter’s friend’s mother who lives in a nearby community, and who heard the gunshots from her home, called and had the girl stay with her family for a few days. She’s now back home but doesn’t plan on staying long.

The woman isn’t unlike some of her neighbours who’ve also sent their children away to stay with relatives and/or friends in less violent communities. But for the most part, it is not a permanent solution.  The mobile police post set up in the community after the August 13 tragedy has restored some amount of hope in the residents, but as our source tells it, the hope is short-lived.

“What’s going to happen when they are gone?” she asked.  “They used to patrol the place from time to time, but once the patrol is over the criminals come and sometimes not even five minutes pass (between the police leaving and the arrival of the criminals).

“It really stressing, but I have to stay strong for my children,” she said.  She said she believes things will get better and that God will deliver Tredegar Park.

Still, she’s upset that “the security forces didn’t pay much attention” to the community in the past.

“A lot of times things happen here and nobody comes. Nobody pays us any mind,” she lamented. “A lot of houses burn down and nobody look at us. It took eight people dying for the minister of national security to come around and look and see where we live.

“It sad, but probably some things have to happen for other things to happen.”