IT was perhaps fate that sealed Denton Parker’s tragic end last Thursday when he came into contact with live electrical wires in Spanish Town and was electrocuted.

The day before his demise, Parker, who worked with a contractor employed to the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) refused to assist Tanya Bailey – the owner of the house which he shared with Bailey and his girlfriend Kameka Grant – with the downed lines in their yard.

He told Bailey then he wasn’t doing anything that involved electricity because he was almost killed by it at work during the day.

On Thursday, however, he went out to work and met his death the very way he was trying to avoid the day before.

“It painful, man. It hot,” Grant told the Observer at her home in Byles, St Catherine on Monday. The two had plans for the future, she said, but declined to give details. It was still too painful, she said.

The 20-year-old said she knew something was amiss when, after waking up with an unusual headache on Thursday, Parker’s face flashed before her eyes.

She called him to make sure everything was all right. He was on the job and couldn’t talk long, but she said he assured her of his love for her and asked her to cook ‘something nice’ for dinner.

About an hour later, she got news that her boyfriend of one year had been hit by power lines and while on the way to the hospital to see him, heard that he had died.

“Mi couldn’t believe it ’cause I was just on the phone with him. Mi frighten when dem ah tell me cause I was just on the phone. Mi just hang up and walk go up deh so ah watch dem ah play Ludo,” Grant told the Observer.

“Dem sey maybe if mi neva hang up the phone him wouldn’t…,” she started to say but trailed off as she replayed her last moments with Parker.

The residents of the small lane where the slain man lived said they missed Denton, whom they described as quiet, helpful and easy-going. Several of them wore black bands around their heads and arms or pinned them onto their clothes.

“He was like a son to me,” Tanya Bailey said, as she related how she took him in about five years ago when he was a teenager. He was a friend of her nephews and needed a place to stay, she said, so she allowed it.

“Him nuh have nuh family ‘roun here but everybody just tek him een…Nuh body nuh have nutten bad fi seh bout ‘Bull’,” Grant chipped in.

“Wi close, close. Ah mi an him roll every weh wi ah go cause wi love one a nedda. Ah mi bredda,” Denton’s older brother George said.

“Ah mi an him grow. Wi neva split up yet. Anyweh ah just mi an him,” he said, adding that he and Denton were the eldest of nine siblings.

“Mi stressed out,” said George, describing the personal effect of his brother’s death. “Mi cyaan sleep, mi cyaan eat. From him dead mi nuh eat.”