A St Ann family has been left devastated after their loved one, 79-year-old William Patterson, was stabbed to death allegedly by a man said to be of unsound mind.

“It has shaken us so hard that I don’t know how we are going to get over this, especially me, because we were like brother and sister,” Patterson’s daughter Doreen Crowther told the Jamaica Observer North & East.

“It is going to take a long while for us to get over this” she added.

Patterson, who is from Harrison Town in Ocho Rios, St Ann, was murdered in the Ocho Rios Cemetery, where he went to look at his son’s grave on October 14. His son, too, was stabbed to death 20 years ago.

“He has always been visiting. There are times when he would say to me or anyone of us, ‘yuh know mi went down a di grave and clean it off,’” Crowther shared.

She said Patterson was always a peaceful and caring man who did not deserve to die in such a gruesome manner.

“He will be coming here and you don’t even know he is coming because he walks very soft. He is caring, loving, especially when it comes to his grandchildren. He is not like a grandfather; he is like the father to them,” the woman told Observer North & East.

She said he was a family man.

“The grandchildren were here over the summer holidays and he spends every day with them; that’s the type of person he is. Going to school we could rely on him. Coming home he would be there to buy the suck-suck,” she mentioned.

Crowther wants more to be done regarding mentally ill people who are often seen roaming the streets in the parish.

“I believe when persons are in this situation, they should be taken off the street to prevent things like this from happening. I don’t believe that Jamaica should be trying to go forward and we have these people on the street harassing people [and] doing these sorts of things and nothing is being done.

“We need to get them off the streets. People are in danger. In cases like this, there is nothing for us. We lost our loved one and that’s just it,” she stressed.

In the meantime, Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Richard Hylton said the accused man has been taken into custody. DSP Hylton, however, made an appeal for people who witnessed the incident to come forward and give a statement.

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