WHEN Maxine Brown suddenly awoke from her sleep shortly after midnight on Wednesday she knew immediately that something was wrong with one of her children.

She said that after she got up to check on her children she came face to face with her worst fear. Her 18-year-old son Roger Smith, also known as ‘Dexter’, had earlier that night been cut down by a hail of bullets a few metres from his home.

Residents said Smith was shot by the police, just over an hour after leaving the family home to hang out with friends.

“When your mother tells you that she feels something about you believe her. I tell you I feel every shot,” Brown told the Observer, lying on cushions on the floor of her verandah at her home in West Cumberland, Portmore, St Catherine.

Brown, dressed in a pink blouse and a black skirt, was surrounded by friends, relatives and well-wishers

“I was in my bed sleeping, and shortly after 12:00 I got up. And then I hear some shots. I walk past his sister at the computer and go outside and when I look I just see pure police. Then little later somebody come by the yard and tell me that my son dead,” Brown told the Observer.

Brown and her family were convinced that Smith was killed by the police. They said the police were far too quick on the scene after the shots that took Smith’s life were heard.

“Everybody start to say ‘this look funny’. How the police reach on the scene so fast. Normally when shots are fired the police take even hours to reach so how they could reach so fast this time,” Brown said.

They also told the Observer that while the scene was being processed some of the officers present allegedly forced residents, claiming to be eyewitnesses, into cars and hastily carried them away.

However, the Constabulary Communication Network (CCN), the police’s information arm, officers were summoned to the area by residents who claimed to have heard gunshots.

According to the CCN, on the arrival of the police Smith’s body was seen with multiple gunshot wounds along West Cumberland Boulevard. He was subsequently taken to the Spanish Town Hospital where he died while undergoing treatment.

The police’s Bureau of Special Investigations yesterday began investigations into the shooting. However, an officer told the Observer yesterday that he could not comment as investigations into the matter had just begun.

However, West Cumberland residents, adamant that Smith was killed by the police, yesterday blocked a section of the Newlands main road, as they protested the shooting.

The boy’s mother, in the meantime, said her son recently graduated from the Portmore Community College and was seeking a job. “Dexter is a kind of person who is very loving. He was a typical 18-year-old,” Brown said.

Brown believes that her son, the eldest of four children, was killed after leaving the house to go smoking.

“He smokes but he is not going to smoke let me see. My view is that he left the house to go and smoke. I figure he just thought to himself ‘Mi soon come back’ and left, and then this go happen to him,” Brown said. “He never even closed the house door after he left,” said the grieving mother.

Smith is survived by two sisters, ages 16 and 13, and an eight-month-old brother.