Three years after police and soldiers fought fierce battles with gunmen in Tivoli Gardens in an attempt to serve an arrest warrant on former strongman Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, wounds are still raw in the once impregnable garrison community.

Sophia Williams didn’t lose a loved one, neither was she injured by gunfire, but she remains traumatised by the macabre experience of that 24-hour battle between gunmen loyal to Coke and police and soldiers, which resulted in the deaths of 77 persons, including a member of the Jamaica Defence Force.

Williams lives in Tivoli Court — a set of high-rise buildings situated close to Spanish Town Road — which was peppered with bullets by agents of the state who were being fired upon by Coke’s combatants.

The security forces eventually overran the band of thugs and took control of the community, but for Williams that was when the real tragedy began.

“I am still hurting and still traumatised. Death came over me. When the soldiers ran into the building they were talking in a language that we couldn’t understand. One of the soldiers said ‘residents of the high-rise building, throw the guns through the window and come out of your houses’. One man attempted to leave his house and they fired on him. They took us from our houses and packed us in one house like sardines. Man, woman and pickney. Shots were still being fired and a lot of bodies were all over the community,” Williams told the Jamaica Observer yesterday.

The woman, who was close to tears, said she will never be able to forget the stench of burning flesh as she accused the soldiers of torching bodies.

She also claimed that members of the security forces occupied her home and destroyed her furniture.

“Them cut up me couch and tear up me mattress. Them thief out my $80,000. All them time deh we couldn’t come out and we could hear them taking men out [of] their houses and shooting them in cold blood,” she said.

Although the police reported that the official civilian death toll was 76, the residents of Tivoli Gardens say the death toll was more than twice that number.

As Williams told of her ordeal, a group of young men sat in a group with glum looks on their faces.

“They took my friend out of his house and killed him in front of his mother. The soldiers shot him in him head,” said one young man who showed a scar on his left arm that he said was inflicted by a bullet that grazed him.

“Them lock up two man in a house for a whole day and then go back inside the people house and kill the two of them on a woman bed. Them wrap up the bodies in a bloody sheet and took them away,” one woman said.

The memories of that historic day are still fresh in the residents’ minds but emotions run high when the anniversary of the event comes around each year.

“Many mothers have not yet got closure, and when it come to this time of the year many of us just break down and cry. There are many people here who have never found their sons, brothers and husbands. They just disappeared without a trace and they can’t close the book when they don’t even know what happened to them,” Williams said.

One youngster, who was detained at the National Arena in Kingston after the shooting died down, claimed that after many of the hundreds of detainees were processed, the police told them of their intention to release them at night.

“I told them I not going back in the night because the soldier dem want [to] kill we off. Even before we leave, them say too much man leaving and them want to kill some more,” the young man said.

One woman, who residents said lost her son during the firefight, was not prepared to speak on the issue and walked briskly inside her house with a look of sadness on her face.

The horror stories were many as the residents accused the soldiers of raping some women in the community.

“One woman get rape by three different soldier one night,” one man charged.

Public Defender Earl Witter, after a long delay, presented the findings of his probe into the event to Parliament earlier this month and recommended that the residents of Tivoli Gardens be compensated to the tune of $110 million.

Jamaica Labour Party councillor for the Tivoli Division Donovan Samuels agreed with Witter that the aggrieved residents should be compensated.

“The people would like to get closure, but the major thing is compensation, whether for psychological damage or physical damage to their property,” Samuels said.