Infant dies in Barrett Town accident
Barrett Town, St James – Ronald Miller was so devoted to his five-month-old son, Jaheim, that he took three days off from work in Miami to return to Jamaica yesterday so that he could take the child to see a dermatologist.
But Miller arrived to the tragic news his baby son had been mowed down by a pickup truck just the night before, metres from his home in Barrett Town, while being carried to his baby sister by an 11-year-old boy.
Police report the 11-year-old was walking with the child along a road in an area of the community known as Saigon when he was hit by the pickup driven by Derrick Edwards, also of Barrett Town.
The force of the impact threw the baby from the 11-year-old’s arms, and the pickup then ran over the infant.
The injured boy was treated at hospital and sent home and Edwards was arrested and charged with manslaughter.
The infant’s distraught mother, Sherine Campbell, 23, was beside herself yesterday afternoon as she awaited Miller’s arrival. “Gwaan go lie down, Sherine,” her mother, Leasie Jackson, advised as the teary-eyed young woman came from the house with a bottle of rubbing alcohol in hand and a towel to wipe her tears.
Campbell, a cook at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Montego Bay, subsequently sat on a stone in the yard and related the horrific ordeal. She said she was not sure how Miller, who works overseas and had only seen the child on two previous occasions when he was a week old and again at three months, would react to the news.
Campbell, who also has a three-year-old daughter from another union, said Miller, 35, had arrived earlier that morning and she was now waiting to see him. She said he had taken time off from work to come home as the child had a recurrent skin condition that repeated visits to the doctor had not helped.
“He said he was coming down to take him to see another doctor,” she told the Observer. “That was the main reason he was coming down.”
Minutes later Miller, the father of three surviving children, arrived in the yard, stone-faced. The two hugged each other tightly as Campbell cried on his shoulders.
According to Campbell, she felt her child could have been saved if Edwards, the driver of the pickup, had heard the 11-year-old boy trying to alert him before he ran over the child.
