The brutal murder of three young children, which horrified the nation Friday, pushed to five the number of youngsters under 16 years old who have been slain in the continued bloodletting since the year began.

Victims of 10% of major crimes over last five years

The chilling slaughter of the three children in the little-heard-of district of Killoncholly, near Highgate in St Mary, came a day after a four month-old baby girl was killed in Trelawny, sparking fears that, at the current rate, more children will be killed this year than the 31 killed in 2004.

Yesterday, Prime Minister P J Patterson described Friday’s triple murder of Dwayne Davidson, 15; Sue-Ann Gordon, 13; and four year-old Shanice Williams as a “tragedy of unspeakable proportion”. The killings were part of a “trend of vicious attacks” on the country’s children, he said.

According to data compiled by the police, children up to 15 years old were the victims of almost 10 per cent of the 38,200 major crimes committed in the last five years.

And the scariest part of it all, said those who try to protect children from harm, was that they felt as if there was nothing they could do to keep the country’s youngsters safe.

“I feel impotent,” said Carol Samuels, the executive director of Jamaica Coalition on the Rights of the Child (JCRC), a Kingston-based child rights group which gets support from UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“The children are scared,” Samuels added.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Patterson instructed a team, made up of officials from the health and social security ministries, to visit the family of the three latest victims and “offer practical and meaningful support to them”. He also offered condolences to the children’s parents.

Over the last five years, 129 children under 16 years old were murdered. Another 171 were shot and injured.

Among the statistics which coldly track this year’s savaging of the country’s children will be four-month-old Candy.

The infant’s life was snuffed out by mindless gunmen who opened fire on her home as she slept, last Thursday, in the Race Course area of Falmouth, Trelawny. Candy’s father, Pharoh McLeish, was also killed and her mother – whose name the police have withheld for security reasons – was seriously injured.

Also among the five children killed this year was nine-year-old Tevin Parchment, shot to death two weeks ago, as he slept in a shanty dwelling in the district of Shervington in Gordon Town. His mother, 20 year-old Kimona Simpson, and her common-law husband Richard Miller, 24, were also killed.

“When we were children we were afraid of duppy (ghost), but now the gunman is real,” said JCRC’s Samuels.

Last year, 53 children under 16 – comprising 22 girls and 31 boys – were shot and injured. In 2000, 17 children were shot and injured, six of them girls. And between 2000 and 2004, there was a 73 per cent increase in the number of girls shot and injured across the island.

Memories are still fresh of last March’s horror in the rural district of Recourse in St Andrew when machete-wielding Melton Haase went berserk and hacked his three nieces to death. They were Tiana Christie, five months old; Peta-Gaye Patterson, six years old; and Brenda-Lee Dinnal, six years old.

Haase injured three other persons, two of them women. After a night of terror, Haase was himself hacked to death when he was cornered by irate residents from the district. The rising statistics and the brutality of the deaths have stirred fears that not even children are being spared any longer, as social attitudes coarsen.

“We are in a crisis and pretending that it is not so. This is not a normal society,” said Betty-Ann Blaine, the convenor of the advocacy group Hear the Children Cry. Sylvia Bailey, the aunt of the three children killed Friday at Killoncholly, is not among those who have the luxury of ‘pretending’.

The horrible murders of her neices and nephew have sapped her strength. She does not know when she will recover, if ever.

“Mi feel lifeless now, from me see it (the murder scene),” she said. “Mi nuh know when mi a go stop feel so, because they were like my own children.”

Her whole family, she said, was gripped by gut-wrenching grief. “It’s devastating, terrible, it really terrible,” Bailey moaned. “Everybody just crying because to know that we don’t really trouble anybody, it really awful. I don’t know when we going to get over it.”

The throats of all three children were slashed and they had multiple stab wounds all over their bodies. A fourth child, 18 month-old Jamel Williams, was left unhurt. He was discovered standing over Shanice’s dead body.

Bailey said the pain of losing all three children at once, compounded by the brutality of their deaths, has far outstripped the grief she felt when her mother died from natural causes.

“I don’t know how we are going to cope now,” she said, quickly adding: “The Lord will help us. We will just try to deal with it and just leave it in the hands of the Lord.”

In addition to the 129 young children who were murdered across the island over the last five years and the 173 who managed to survive being shot:

. 140 were robbed;

. 32 were the victims of break-ins;

. 1,528 little girls were raped; and

. 1,794 were carnally abused.

These are only the cases that have been reported and the statistics were silent on boys who might have been sexually abused. The number of carnal abuse cases has been on the increase since 2002, moving from 268 that year to 377 in 2003, before it shot up to 409 last year. However, that was still less than the 434 cases reported in 2000.

Reported rapes of girls 15 years old and younger have fluctuated over the last five years. In 2000, there were 147, but that number more than doubled the next year when it moved up to 303. In 2002, rape cases climbed to 329; in 2003 to 394, with a drop to 358 in 2004.

“Violence did not fall from the sky, and we have created the environment which will produce criminals,” said Blaine. “We are reaping what we sow. We have sown the seeds of abandonment and neglect and now it has come back to haunt us.”

“We are living in a country that places no value on the women and children. Women and children are the most vulnerable and they are now under attack more than ever,” she said.

Five hundred and sixty-one women were killed across Jamaica over the last five years; another 695 were shot and injured; 3,476 were the victims of robberies; 4,043 had their homes broken into and 4,504 were raped, according to police figures.