DONNA-MARIE Smith who travelled hundreds of miles from Turks and Caicos to Jamaica to spend some quality time with her son, Dejon Hibbert, whom she had not seen in nine months, will now have to use the time to plan her only son’s funeral.

Dejon, 16, who just completed fifth form at the Calabar High School in Kingston, was brutally stabbed in Manor Park on Monday, during an altercation with a man who robbed him of a cell phone he had borrowed from his mother. He died from the injuries on Tuesday morning.

“They killed my son for a $6,000 (Motorola) phone,” said Smith. “I gave him the phone because I was planning to be here for a while so I allowed him to take the phone,” she said.

“.When he was leaving he blew me a kiss, and the next thing I know someone came to tell me that they had news about my son,” Smith told the Observer yesterday as she sat in a sofa at her parent’s house at Wireless Station Road in Stony Hill, St Andrew. “When I got to the hospital I saw him laying there and I said to him ‘Dejon this is mommy’, but all he did was move his head a little.”

Smith said before the nurses wheeled her son into the operating theatre, they told her that the main arteries in his heart had been severed, and that he had lost a lot of blood at the scene of the accident and his body rejected transfused blood.

But despite the efforts of the medical team Dejon died almost 12 hours after he was attacked.

Yesterday, Dejon’s grandmother, Beryl Smith, who has been taking care of him since birth was overcome with grief and only uttered short phrases as she paced her living room floor.

“Oh Lord have mercy,” she said through her wailing. “It rough,” was her response to queries of how she was coping with he grandson’s death.

But Dejon’s family believes that he may have known his attacker as they were given reports that minutes before he was stabbed he told the robber “imagine you know me and you just tek weh me phone suh”. They have also heard that Dejon was stabbed with a filed down ratchet knife.

Smith, who left the island years ago to find work to support her two children, told the Observer that she arrived in Jamaica on June 24 to go to Dejon’s graduation ceremony on June 28, and to help him to decide which tertiary institutions he would be applying to once he received his Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) results.

“We were waiting to see what his CXC results were like before we sent him off to school,” she said. “He wanted to be an accountant just like his sister, but now I will never know if he would have accomplished that goal.” Dejon had convinced his mother to allow him to take driving lessons during summer so that he could get his licence.

Smith remembers her son as a smart, cheerful and loving youngster. “We had a very good relationship. I was able to scold him from afar and he would always do what he is told,” she said.

Smith said her son’s room was exactly the same way he left it before his life was ended. His shoes were neatly packed in a corner beside his bed, which was smartly made.

Meantime, other family members who went to visit the family yesterday were in a sombre mood. Many tried to hold back the tears as Dejon’s mother remembered him, while youngsters in the community have also posted black flags on light poles leading up to his house.

Dejon is the second student to be killed in less than a week. Last Friday another male student was shot and killed just outside his school gate at Tarrant High School in Kingston.