IN seven months – all things being equal – 19-year-old Tian Wolfe of Hampstead, St Thomas, would have taken her ‘bundle of joy’ home from the hospital.

But instead of arranging a baby shower in anticipation of that joyous occasion, Wolfe’s family is today reluctantly planning a Thanksgiving Service to celebrate a life allegedly cut short last Tuesday by bullets from a policeman’s gun.

The family’s grief is twofold. They are mourning the loss of a young woman who will never realise her dream of becoming a nurse and the broken promise that her two-month-old foetus has come to symbolise.

They refuse to believe that their promise of something new and wonderful – their hope for the future – had been cruelly snatched away in the embryonic stage.

Indeed, the pain is almost physical for would-be father 20-year-old Nevel Higgins.

“Mi feel bad,” said the boyfriend of three years.

“All now mi can’t come back to mi self. Ah can’t believe sey this happen to her and mi first baby,” Higgins cried. Higgins said that the last time he spoke to Wolfe was last Monday evening when she promised to give him her MP3 player, which he should have picked up last Tuesday morning.

Wolfe’s mother, Barbara ‘Peanut’ Brown, was at a loss for words.

“I miss her a lot I can’t explain how I miss her…,” she told the Sunday Observer in a telephone interview. Brown, who has a 13-year-old son, said Wolfe was her first child; “my only daughter”.

Inside that same district, another mother, a common-law wife and two young children were also trying to come to terms with the death of Dexter Hyatt.

The 31-year-old labourer, who burned coal for a living, was shot dead minutes before the pregnant teen.

According to police reports, Hyatt was found suffering from gunshot wounds and clutching a 9mm Taurus revolver shortly after gunmen had allegedly engaged a police party on an operation inside that community in a gun battle. The illegal gun, the police later said, was sent to the forensic laboratory for ballistic tests.

But the residents accused the police of brutally beating and murdering Hyatt in cold blood, and subsequently blocked roads in Yallahs and in Hampstead to register their disgust.

Wolfe, the residents said, was allegedly shot by the police when she went out into the street upon hearing of Hyatt’s death. She had not joined in the protest, they said.

The police, for their part, said they fired in the crowd of protesters after they were fired on, and stones hurled at them.

The officers involved in Tuesday’s incident were removed from front-line duty, in keeping with the constabulary’s use of force policy. The police’s Bureau of Special Investigations also swabbed their hands and seized their firearms for ballistic testing.

But even as the affected families await the results of those tests, they are trying desperately to hang on to those precious moments before the lives of their loved ones were snuffed out. But right now they keep coming back to the same place: the death scene.

Hyatt’s mother, 70- year-old Ruby Hyatt, will never forget that her son had been on his way to see her when he was killed.

“Dexter is the tenth of my eleven children; their father died seven years ago and he always come to visit me every day. He was on his way yesterday (Tuesday) when police kill him,” she moaned.

“He was a very quiet person and was loved by everyone, I can’t see very well because I am diabetic and have high blood pressure so he cooks for me.”

Invariably, her thoughts drift back to the shooting.

“I was sitting right here so (under a tree) and ah hear three shots, and ah say, ‘A who dat now?’ Afterwards ah see his two brothers, Desmond and Sherman come and tell mi sey police kill Dexter,” she said.

Vivienne McPherson, Hyatt’s common-law wife of 13 years, recalled that she had prepared boiled dumplings and tinned mackerel for his dinner on Monday night. McPherson said Hyatt went to bed and woke up about 6:00 Tuesday morning, and was on his way to visit his sick mother when he was shot.

He had planned to get some snacks for his children to take to school on his way back from his mother’s house. But seven-year-old Kevin, who attends Yallahs Primary and three-year-old Leonie, who started attending Yallahs Church of God Basic School for the first time last Monday, never got their special treats.

According to the residents, Hyatt never made it to his mother’s house as he was stopped by a group of police officers who were in the area on special assignment. They said the officers were leaving the community when they saw Hyatt walking on the road.

It was reported that Hyatt, upon seeing the cops approaching, threw away a “ganja spliff” that he had been smoking. The police stopped and alighted from their vehicles and allegedly demanded that Hyatt retrieve whatever it was that he had thrown into the bushes. Residents told the Sunday Observer that when Hyatt failed to produce the ‘object’, the police allegedly started beating and kicking him. Residents alleged that he lost two teeth in the process. They alleged that the police then shot him three times, while he begged for his life with his hands in the air.

“He died without having a cup of tea,” McPherson mused last Wednesday. “We are together for 13 years now,” she rambled on. “We met on a sports day when I was 16 at the Yallahs Primary School and have been friends since.”

While reminiscing on the “happy” years spent with Hyatt, McPherson said that she will always remember him as a family man – a father who preferred “to stay hungry” as long as his family had eaten.

“I can’t believe he has died. I will always remember him playing with his children. He did this a lot,” she added.

For Wolfe’s family, the memories were just as painful.

Aunt Tamika Smith, with whom Wolfe lived for more than seven years, recalled that her niece was “a quiet person who did not give any trouble”.

Wolfe, a past student of Dunoon Technical High School, was a student nurse who enjoyed caring for children and the elderly.

“Her favourite meal was kidney and rice and just last Monday evening her grandmother cooked kidney and food, she say she don’t want any food with the kidney and she cooked some rice and had her meal. She was fashion conscious and loved going to parties, she was always smiling. Every morning she wake mi up,” Smith said, with tears streaming down her face.

Brown, meanwhile, demanded to know why her child had been taken from her.

“She was not in the roadblock; why dem kill her?” she asked between sobs, adding that she had no money “fi bury her. A how it guh?”

Another family member, Tracy Martin, said Wolfe was a “nice, quiet, soft-spoken young lady” who tended to be “stubborn” sometimes.

“Mi tell her not to go out there. She wanted to carry my baby and ah tell her to leave him alone; just like mi know that something was going to happen. If her uncle was here and tell her not to go she would listen to him,” she said, as the tears rolled slowly down her cheeks.

Meanwhile, Levi Rodney, a social worker from the Ministry of Justice’s Victim Support Unit, who was at the house counselling the distressed family members last Wednesday, encouraged them to remain “calm and allow the law to take its course”.