ONE grieving man said authorities allowed his brother’s body to decompose. There was an odour. Some relatives wept uncontrollably.

It was an emotionally wrenching scene at the Spanish Town Hospital Morgue, St Catherine, where autopsies were conducted Thursday on four residents of Crawle, Clarendon, whom police say they killed on May 7 in a “shoot-out”. Neighbours say the victims — two women and two men — were shot in cold blood by members of the controversial Crime Management Unit (CMU).

Government forensic pathologist Dr Persad performed the autopsies, while Dr Deryck Pounder — a Scottish forensic pathologist sent by human rights watchdog Amnesty International — observed the post-mortem and took notes.

Earlier in the day, the bodies were transported from the Johnson’s Funeral Parlour Clarendon to the May Pen Hospital in Denbigh, and they were X-rayed there.

For the most part, local human rights group, Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ) and Families Against State Terrorism (FAST) gave authorities high marks for their handling of the post-mortems. Unlike in past cases, they said, the autopsies were performed in a transparent and professional manner. Each took about two hours. One member of each family was permitted to observe the autopsy.

“Everything has gone smoothly,” said Susan Goffe, JFJ chairperson, at the morgue. “One hopes that the fact that the pathologist took a longer than usual time for each autopsy is an indication that they were being done thoroughly. One hopes that authorities intend to maintain this new standard as a norm.”

Goffe noted that a police photographer took photographs and videotaped the proceedings. And unlike in past cases, an independent pathologists was allowed to observer the autopsies and take notes, she said.

Two years ago, local rights groups sharply criticised authorities whom, they said, were hasty and unprofessional when performing autopsies on the bodies of seven youths in the controversial Braeton Seven shootings. The Crawle autopsies, on the other hand, were open and comprehensive, said the chairman of FAST, Yvonne Sobers, at the morgue.

Alberta Thompson-Williams, a member of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, arrived to see her sister, 39-year-old Lewina Thompson. But the sight was too much for her, and she was escorted immediately out of the morgue. She was offered a chair under a tree. She wept uncontrollably.

At the morgue, relatives and friends had no place to wait inside the facility. So they gathered outside beneath a tree, seeking shelter from the scorching sun and venting their anger to one another.

Gathering together, they were visibly upset over the shootings that, once again, focused attention on the use of excessive force by the police.

Patrick Finch arrived to identify his sister, 44-year-old Angella Richards. She had a large gush across her chest: “This is all I see when I went inside.”

Howard James identified his brother whose left eye was swollen. His complexion had darkened from brown to black, he said.

Anthony Gordon said when identifying his brother, Kirk, the body had an apparent gunshot wound on the mouth. The body was swollen and it “smell high”, he said.

“I could not look at him any longer.”

A fourth man identified only as “Renegade” also was slain.

Superintendent Stewart denied the bodies were decomposing. “Like anywhere else where you have dead bodies you have an odour, but it’s nothing to talk about.”

Dr Pounder, who heads the department of forensic medicine at the University of Dundee, Scotland, told the Observer it was too soon to draw conclusions from the autopsies.

“The strength of forensic evidence lies in correlating the finding on bodies with the findings at the scene of the deaths. I have not been to the scene of the deaths, so I can make no comment until I have done both,” he said.

Goffe’s only criticism was the conditions in which the families of the deceased had to wait before identifying the bodies and waiting for them to be released.

She said relatives should have been offered seating indoors, rather than having to wait outside the hospital in the sun.