Grief and anger hung heavy in the Whitfield Town Seventh-day Adventist Church yesterday as mourners reflected on the thwarted life of six-year-old Shanika Anderson, and listened as Government minister Portia Simpson Miller warned the little girl’s killer that he could not escape God’s justice.

“Murderer, rapist, criminal, animal, cast your eyes on the casket,” Simpson Miller, the member of parliament for South Western St Andrew, said from the pulpit. “You have robbed us of a bright star, and you are having fun and smiling now, but the last laugh belongeth to the family and God, whose eyes are piercing down on you.”

“Murderer, you will not get away. God is a just God. We will receive justice. We might not know you now, but the eyes of the Almighty are watching you,” she said.

Shanika’s nude body was found in bushes on an open lot in East Kingston on May 1, just under a month before her seventh birthday. She was raped and strangled by a man who had lured her and a little boy away from the Coronation Market, downtown Kingston, with a promise of food.

The little girl’s mother, Ruth Green, who is a vendor in the market, said she had left Shanika with the boy on April 30 and had gone in search of goods to sell, only to return and find them missing.

She searched the general area of the market without success, but the boy returned at about 6:30 pm and told them that the man had taken them to the St William Grant Park, about 300 metres away, and had bought him patties and juice before taking away Shanika.

Yesterday, Simpson Miller, known for her passionate concern for the poor, said the killer had robbed Jamaica of a possible future scientist, who probably would have found the cure for HIV or cancer.

“She could have been the next member of parliament for this constituency, the councillor for this division, the next school principal,” said Simpson Miller.

She called on Jamaican parents to give truth to the African saying that it takes a village to raise a child, treat each child as their own and protect them at all costs.

“Parents, don’t just see her as a little girl from Whitfield Town, see her as your daughter – raped, murdered, left to die. Take the decision now that something must be done to protect our children,” Simpson Miller said.

Marsha Davy, principal of St Francis Basic School where Shanika was a student just under a year ago before moving on to Whitfield All-Age, remembered the little girl as a track star. “She didn’t get a chance to win more medals,” said Davy, who also urged the authorities to find the “heartless killer” who carried out the “gruesome murder”.

“The whole Jamaica mourns, please find Shanika’s murderer as soon as possible,” she pleaded in her eulogy amid loud cries from children and adults in the congregation. When she was finished, the children could not stop crying.

Tears streamed down the face of Shanika’s mother for the duration of the ceremony and she left the church, at the end of the service, with pursed lips as more tears flowed.

The little girl’s father, Harold Anderson, who wore a shirt with his daughter’s picture on it and dark glasses, moved swiftly about the church, trying to make sure that everything was okay. But he was unable to mask his deep sadness at the loss of the couple’s youngest child.

Shanika’s sister, Anepha Anderson, started paying tribute to her sister with the song Missing You but broke down and left the altar after singing the lines “There were so many things we could have shared/If time was on our side”.