JANET Mattis could not contain her grief yesterday as she sat metres away from her son’s body, which lay in a gully buried under a pile of filth and garbage.

“You can get back mi son for mi sah?” Mattis asked an Observer photographer while she was being spoon-fed tea from a cup by one of her neighbours.

As she wailed, cried and squirmed uncontrollably, scenes of crime detectives were searching the area for clues surrounding the death of 31-year-old Craig Morgan.

Morgan was shot dead Monday night and his body dragged and dumped in a gully which runs alongside Sherlock Drive, an impoverished community which runs off Mannings Hill Road and connects to several others on Whitehall Avenue.

Police say they were called to the area yesterday morning after residents discovered Morgan’s body under the pile of garbage.

“The people called us here after one of them went in the gully and found the body,” a cop on the scene told the Observer.

Scores of persons gathered near the death scene but none were able to say why Morgan was killed. Most of the onlookers said they did not hear any explosions in their community the night before.

However, one resident broke the unwritten code of silence of the inner-city.

“It happen about 11 o’clock. Them shoot him two time and drag the body, dump it inna the gully and bury it under the garbage,” the resident said.

Morgan’s body was not a sight for the faint-hearted. His sneaker-clad feet lay close to a stream of smelly water which ran through the middle section of the gully. His contorted face lay on an old coir mattress, while the rest of his body was hidden among an old stroller, pieces of metal and other forms of debris. A trail of blood leading from the spot he was shot to the edge of the gully told the tale of his gruesome death.

From the reaction of the residents, Morgan was apparently not involved in any criminal activity.

“Him was a hard-working man, I don’t know why anyone would want to kill him,” one woman said.

After a while Morgan’s mother was overwhelmed with grief and had to be removed from the scene by her neighbours.

The police, in the meantime, said they have not established a motive for the killing.