HIGHGATE, St Mary – Principal of the St Mary Technical High School Owen Grant says the entire school population is hurting from Monday’s murder of one of their own – Roachell Blair, the Grade Seven student who was found stabbed to death at her house at Clonmel, near Highgate.

“Everybody is devastated, it’s unbelievable. Right now we’re trying to come to grips with the situation. We’re trying our best,” Grant said.

Grant told the Observer that Roachell’s form teacher “was just not herself” since the brutal murder of one of her 12 students, with whom she was beginning to work closely.

Yesterday, counsellors from the Ministry of Education as well as other schools in the parish visited to lend support to the students at St Mary Technical.

Roachell attended her last class on Monday, returning home about 2:30 pm. However, because no one was at home she changed her clothes and was to have left to see her grandmother, who lives a short distance away. She was to have stayed with her grandma until her mom reached home.

She never got a chance to leave the house to see her grandmother.

When the child’s mother Andrea Foster, returned home Monday night, she was in for a shock.

“At about 8:50 when the mother returned home, Roachell’s body was found lying on the floor in a pool of blood with several stab wounds all over her body,” Cpl Angella McTaggart, Constabulary Communication Network officer for St Mary, told the Observer.

But even more shocking, McTaggart said, was that, according to the mother, the child was assaulted with a broom stick, which the mother found protruding from her body.

The police said there was no forced entry to the house and from the appearance of the room, the little girl tried desperately to ward off her attacker(s) before she was killed.

Roachell’s grandmother, Sylvia Palmer, told the Observer yesterday that the family was trying its best to cope with the loss.

“It’s hard, but we have to be strong. Both of us (she and Roachell’s mother) can’t break down, one of us has to be strong for the other,” she said.

Roachell’s murder comes just months after a teenager was chopped to death and parts of her body severed and dumped at various places in the Highgate area.

Two years ago three children – ages 15, 13, four years – were slaughtered in Kilancholly district, near Highgate.