Sixteen year-old Alicia Brown won’t be going to school this morning. The Mona High student lost all her belongings in a fire sparked by a Molotov cocktail that reduced her house at 1c Lower York Street in Franklyn Town to rubble early yesterday morning.

“I don’t know what I am going to do, because all of my things burn up, even my rental books and my other books that my mother paid a lot of money for,” Brown told the Observer. “I don’t know how I’m going to make it to school tomorrow, because I have nothing; only the clothes on my back.”

Brown is one of 34 people left homeless by the fire that spread over three tenements – 1b and 1c Lower York Street and 9 Cumberland Avenue – in the Central Kingston community where buildings stand close to each other. Most of the persons who lived in the Cumberland Avenue building are elderly.

Yesterday after the firebombing, residents started leaving the community. “I don’t know where I’m going, but I have to leave because things are getting worse,” said one woman who asked not to be named. “A long time them seh them a go burn down the place, and see them do it.”

Yesterday, police said the woman was referring to an ongoing feud in the community that started when a young lady was killed in the area in March this year.

Police said the men who carried out yesterday’s attack were alleged to have come from a neighbouring community called McKintyre.

Yesterday, Alicia Brown said she and her sister, Kemesha, narrowly escaped death as the bomb was thrown into the room where they were sleeping.

“I woke up about 5:00 this morning and I heard some talking. Then I heard a window break and my sister and I jumped up and went to wake up our mother,” Brown said.

“After that, we heard them throw the fire bomb into the room that we were in, so we had to break down about two doors to go to another tennant’s house at the back and we stayed there until we didn’t hear anymore talking.”

After the men left, Alicia Brown said that her family sought refuge in a community bathroom and locked themselves in until the police arrived.

Kemesha Brown said she was more worried about her five-year-old son than she was about herself. She, too, lost all her possessions, including her son’s school clothes and books.

“I don’t know how I’m going to manage because even the little money that I had in the house burn up,” she said, adding that she was worried about how her family would cope because she doesn’t have a job.

Yesterday evening, Victor Cummings, the member of parliament for Central Kingston, appealed for a more permanent police presence in the area.

“I am asking for the police to put a permanent post in that community because the violence has to stop,” he said.