THE mother of two young boys who were killed in Tivoli Gardens during the May 2010 operation yesterday struggled to fight back tears and to maintain her composure as she recalled how her sons were taken from her house and allegedly shot execution-style by the police.

The Tivoli Enquiry had to break twice in order to give the sobbing woman, Marjorie Williams, time to compose herself, as she moaned loudly and held her head.

“My belly is hurting me,” the witness said before being led from the room moaning and in tears.

The mother of two, a 48-year-old housewife, testified that during the deadly operation she was home on May 25 in the morning with her two sons and 13-year-old twin daughters, her brother, and 80-year-old blind father when a soldier came and ordered her sons and brother out of the house.

She said that after her sons — Fabian ‘Christopher’ Grant, 20, and Fernando ‘Poopsy’ Grant, 17 — obeyed the order to leave the house they were told to kneel on the sidewalk with their hands on their heads.

The woman testified that she followed her sons outside but was ordered back inside by the police.

Williams said she complied and started peeping through a missing window downstairs her house, from where she could see her sons lying down in a garden at a nearby residence, and could also hear their cries.

“Both of my sons were crying and the police said ‘shut up, boys, you going dead today’,”

“You actually hear him say that?” asked chairman of the commission Sir David Simmons.

“Yes,” Williams replied.

The witness said her blind father then came downstairs and she told him what was happening and that she feared the police were going to kill her sons.

At that point, Williams broke down, and after she was given time to recover, said that she next heard one of her sons crying out and heard an explosion.

“I stepped away and not even a second I hear Fernando cry out, then I heard an explosion,” she said. “I hear Fernando say ‘Mummy, Mummy, dem kill Poopsy.”

She said that shortly after she heard her son crying out that they were going to kill him, she heard an explosion.

Williams said she later looked outside and saw a policeman and a male resident dragging the body of one of her sons and putting it in a truck that was parked on the road.

The witness testified that the male resident was also killed.

Williams said when the police and soldiers left with the bodies of her sons she went to the scene and saw one foot of the orange slippers that one of her sons had been wearing.

Later during the enquiry she was shown a picture of the scene with one foot of the said orange slippers. The sight made her emotional.

“Dem take away mi two sons,” she wailed.

“Betta dem did dead when dem did born. Jesus, those police are not lawmen, they come and see that they were so calm, gunmen are not so calm,” she rattled on in grief while holding her head.

Prior to her account of how her sons were killed Williams told the enquiry that on the said morning both sons told her that they were nervous and one of them said that he felt as if he was going to die.

Williams, under cross-examination from Lord Anthony Gifford, who is representing the Office of the Public Defender, said that her two sons were quiet, respectable, law-abiding citizens.

But attorney Valerie Neita-Robertson, who is representing the Jamaica Constabulary Force, during her cross-examination of the witness suggested that the men were gunmen and that Williams had conspired with the two soldier witnesses to concoct a story to explain how the men were killed.

Neita-Robertson also suggested that one of the young men was buried with his gun. However, her suggestions were strongly denied by the witness.

Williams also testified that she had heard when her neighbour, whom she called ‘Porridge Man’, was shot dead.

She said before his death they were both outside when the police ordered him inside, and he called out to her and said: “Marjorie, give me a hand.”

“When I went inside I heard gunshot go off,” Williams said while recalling that she had seen more than four policemen and soldiers going inside her neighbour’s house.

At that point, Williams said she told one of her daughters: “Dem kill Porridge Man, dem a go kill Poopsy and Christopher.”

Williams said she then looked outside and saw them carrying out the body of Porridge Man wrapped in a sheet.

The enquiry will continue today at the Jamaica Conference Centre with testimony from a Jamaica Defence Force soldier.