TO get to Gravel Heights, just outside of Spanish Town in St Catherine, you must skilfully navigate your way along a dusty and hilly track that is filled with jagged rocks and overgrown vegetation.

Once you arrive, a quick glance around reveals more than a dozen wooden and zinc shacks in some sections of the community, pockmarked by unfinished concrete structures, some of which appear damaged. Illegal electricity wire connections, some tangled in bunches, are everywhere. One zinc gate bears the sign: “Suck suck, bag juice and phone cards on sale inside”. But several knocks at the gate are met with silence. There is no one home. A light bulb on the small verandah burns brightly, seemingly competing with the scorching mid-morning sun.

If you visit many of the houses there today, you will be greeted by an eerie silence from within. They have been abandoned by their owners, who have packed up their belongings and fled for their lives to other areas of the large parish, and elsewhere.

The mass exodus from the community, triggered by death threats from armed criminal terrorists from in and around the area, has resulted in Gravel Heights now largely resembling a ghost town out of a Hollywood western.

Dexter English, 28, is one of the few brave souls who have courageously refused to leave the community.

“Right now I don’t intend to move because I don’t believe innocent people should just pack up and leave them house like that. I don’t see it that way,” English tells the Sunday Observer, taking a break from the meal he is preparing on a coal pot outside his back door. “It’s not people from up here fault. What we get to understand is that man from the [One] Order want to force people who voted for the PNP out of the community so that them can take over. But we not going to just sit and watch that happen.”

English says that the gunshots that rang out for several nights in the community two weeks ago was the final scaring tactic by the armed thugs that caused his former neighbours to flee.

Video footage of residents loading their furniture and other belongings onto moving vehicles was captured on television newscasts and made print headlines last week.

But English insists the violence and intimidation did not begin only recently. In fact, he says the terror has been ongoing since the last general elections, but worsened in the last three months. He estimates that more than half of the 200 residents who occupied the hilly section of Gravel Heights have evacuated the community.

“Plain and straight, this is a little community that did cool and calm but right now, things take a turn for the worse, trust me. Nuff people move and gone cause them scared,” offers Omar, another male resident in his late 20s. “And is not now the foolishness a gwaan, ah good while now, fi real.”

Like English, Omar says the violence has kept him from working steadily at a nearby construction site.

In Jamaica, residents being forced out of their communities is not new. In fact, this has been a ‘tradition’ in Jamaica for decades, according to human rights activists like Dr Carolyn Gomes.

“This has been going on in Jamaica for years and years and years. We need to establish law and order across the entire island. Too many communities have been abandoned by the security forces,” insists Gomes, who is the executive director of Jamaicans For Justice (JFJ).

The emotional scars left behind in Gobay (St Catherine), Canaan Heights (Clarendon), Hellgate (Hanover) and Norwood (St James) speak volumes, she points out.

“As a society we are not doing enough to protect all our communities and we cannot allow it to continue,” the JFJ boss said.

For years, police have battled it out in such communities with criminals, refusing to surrender control to thugs while seeking to ensure the safety of law-abiding residents, explains Superintendent Assan Thompson, head of the Spanish Town police.

Back in Gravel Heights, Simone, a striking young woman with almond eyes and high-set cheeks, tells a story with some major variations. She reports that uniformed officers from the Spanish Town Police Station have verbally abused and accused her of harbouring wanted criminals.

“We scared of the police them more than the bad man,” the fair-skinned mother of two bellows. “[The police] them come up here seh them going to rape wi if wi don’t tell them where the bad man them deh. Them seh the reason wi don’t move is because wi know the bad man them, and nothing don’t guh suh. Mi and my children and my babyfather don’t have anywhere to go; that’s why wi still up here ah rough it out.”

Her friend Keneisha is clearly distraught and stares at the ground as she speaks of the severe emotional shock she recently suffered at the hands of a policeman.

“Yesterday one of them drape mi up and squeeze mi throat and say mi and mi boyfriend know the bad man them,” says Keneisha, over a washpan of children’s clothes. “The police them ah seh, wi in league with the criminals and asking wi fi tell them ’bout ‘James’ and ‘Crabs’, who we never hear ’bout yet. Them can’t treat people suh. We frustrated because them supposed to ah look out fi we.”

However, speaking with the Sunday Observer last week, Thompson strongly refuted the women’s claims and said some residents have been unco-operative with the police.

“Everywhere you go is the same thing, but we have been encouraging the police here to be as co-operative with people as much as possible,” he said, adding that their investigation has been progressing gradually. “We have been having several meetings. The Gravel Heights situation is one we are looking into very carefully right now.”

Meanwhile, other Gravel Heights residents like Vivienne Patterson and her sister-in-law are surprisingly upbeat and optimistic about the future of the community they have called home for more than two decades.

“We feel terrible about what going on but at least my children are able to go to school. If I had somewhere to go I’d move but right now Gravel Heights is all we have,” said Patterson, slowly looking around.

With the Christmas season in full swing, the pregnant mother of three is planning to chop down some of the bushes that surround her small home.