ABOUT 4:00 am on Tuesday, Jacqueline Hamilton-Carby said her morning prayers, but could not return to sleep.

Her son Stephen Richardson, who had been living in the United States since 1999, was on her mind. She decided to write him a letter.

“It has been 43 days, that is 1,032 hours or 61,920 minutes better yet 3, 715,200 seconds since I heard your voice. That is a long, l-o-n-g time, but whereas I was worried before, I have placed you in the hand of God,” Hamilton-Carby wrote.

Four hours after she put down her pen, 22-year-old Richardson, a member of the US Army who had been deployed to the war in Iraq, was dead.

“My, my, my, my son,” Hamilton-Carby muttered, with a deep sigh yesterday afternoon.

“I was hoping that maybe is a hand blow off or maybe a foot,” Hamilton-Carby said of her state of mind when she first learnt later that day that something had happened to her son. When she finally got confirmation of his death, she just broke down.

Hamilton-Carby was not formally notified of her son’s death until yesterday afternoon. A lieutenant based at the American Embassy in Kingston, gave her the news – although she had already spoken to her son’s wife earlier in the day and had her worst fears confirmed.

Hamilton-Carby is not sure how her son died, but is satisfied that God took him at the appropriate time.

“I am not angry with the US Army, I am not angry with Mr [US President Geroge W Bush, I’m not angry with anyone. I refuse to be angry. He [Richardson] chose to go there…I just view it as the work of God,” Hamilton-Carby said, clearly saddened. She told the Observer that she had cried so much the day before, she felt like she had no more tears left.

Hamilton-Carby said she last spoke to her son on February 5 – the day he was deployed to Iraq. In the letter she wrote to him early Tuesday morning, she called Richardson the “crowned one”.

Yesterday, Lt Terry McFarlane, who is based at the United States Embassy in Kingston told the Observer that he was unable to comment on how Richardson, a Private First Class, died or where in Iraq he was based. Private First Class is the rank above Private and below Corporal in the US Army.

Hamilton-Carby said arrangements will be made for the funeral of her only child to be held in St Mary.

“I told them that he is a Jamaican and I want him here,” she said.

Richardson died leaving behind one child and baby scheduled to arrive on July 7 – on the same day he would have celebrated his 23rd birthday had he lived.