HAD they known that it would be her last errand, the parents of 22-year-old Sherine Brown would never have allowed her to run to a shop along Chisholm Avenue in Kingston last Saturday to buy meat for the day’s soup dinner, her usual Saturday morning routine.

But wishful thinking cannot change the fact that Brown is now dead… her life snuffed out by a stray bullet, allegedly fired by an apparently enraged motorist trying to shoot a man of unsound mind after he hit his car with a plastic bottle.

The man, 50-year-old Noel Hunter, a contractor who hails from St Catherine, was granted bail in the sum of $500,000 when he appeared in the Gun Court section of the Half-Way-Tree Resident Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday. He is scheduled to return to court on September 12.

But while Hunter awaits his fate, Brown’s family members are devastated as they continue to grapple with the suddenness of her death.

“Make me see her, she [is] inside, I want to ask her if she ate anything today. I want to ask her if she iron her clothes yet. Make me see her. I want to go in and see her,” Brown’s mother Karlene Reid muttered, as family members tried to console her on the verandah of her Chisholm Avenue home on Monday.

But her mutterings quickly turned to screams of “I can’t live without her, I can’t live without Terry (Brown’s nickname). Carry me and let me go dead with her too. Jesus Christ, can this be real?” as she wrung her hands and stomped her feet in anguish.

It was easy to understand Reid’s pain. After all, Brown was her only child – and a promising one too, having graduated with a Bachelor’s in Education from the University of Technology (UTech) in May.

“She just finished in May and on Friday they called for her to come in this morning (Monday) for an interview at UTech. She was doing a summer programme at the [tax] office, this week was to be her last week but I got to understand from her boss that they were considering keeping her on for a little longer,” said Brown’s aunt, Denise Edwards.

Recounting the events that occurred Saturday morning, Edwards told the Observer that Brown was going about her usual Saturday routine when she was killed.

“Like every Saturday she would get up, do her chores as usual, and go to the meat shop to get whatever is needed, this was no exception. On her way up there was a passing motorist and he stopped saying there was a madman who threw a plastic bottle on his vehicle (a green Hyundai) and he came out and his little boy was shouting “Don’t shoot, Daddy, don’t shoot, it’s just a mad man.”

“And he (Hunter) just come out, he didn’t even aim, he just shoot. And the madman by this time was down the road. It caught her right in the stomach.”

Edwards also told the Observer that Hunter picked up Brown off the ground and rushed her to the hospital, where she was later pronounced dead. It was also alleged that Hunter tried to flee the scene after hearing of Brown’s death but was prevented from doing so by men who had travelled behind him to the hospital. He was later handed over to the police.

On Monday, Brown’s grandparents, Alphanso and Myrtle Gordon, who had been caring for her ever since she was a baby, were still overwhelmed by her death.

“I don’t get over it but I’m trying to cope. She was nice, she was quiet, she was honest, she was everything that is good, and it’s not because she is my own why I say that, she was really good,” Gordon said, adding that he was the one to close her eyes for the last time when he saw her body at the morgue.

“I am grieving. Is a girl that lived a decent and respectable life in my house. You never see her on the street… you never saw her kotching on the gate like any other. She always put herself together. She was never baptised but she attended church every Sunday, and she will be greatly missed,” Gordon added.