LINSTEAD, St Catherine — Fourteen members of a family, including children who up to last month were sleeping in chicken coops, have been ordered to leave the land they are accused of occupying illegally in the vicinity of Linstead Fire Station in St Catherine.

Their two households, as well as another that has one male occupant, were served with notices on October 2 to vacate the property within 30 days.

The property is owned by the National Road Operating and Constructing Company Limited (NROCC), which is a public entity representing the Government of Jamaica’s interest in the Highway 2000 toll road.

There were people living on the land before the Government acquired it compulsorily to build the highway, but they were compensated and relocated.

However, since the highway was constructed, other persons have been building wooden houses on the land and living there without permission.

In the area where the notices have been served for people to vacate, there are three wooden houses. The one that has been there the longest belongs to a Christopher Gordon.

Another young man, Swayne Sullivan, later moved onto the property and built a relatively small room there. He ended up sharing the room with 13 other people: his girlfriend, his child, his mother Natalie Hutchinson, his eight under-aged siblings, and one of his adult sisters who now has a baby.

Having 14 people in Sullivan’s small room proved a challenge and so some of them — including children — ended up sleeping in two chicken coops that are located on the property.

Their terrible living conditions caught the attention of a philanthropist, Rebecca Stewart, better known as Servant Becky, a Trinidadian church leader living in the United States. She came to Jamaica recently and built a wooden house and furnished it for Natalie Hutchinson and her eight children.

While claiming that another occupant of the land gave her verbal permission to build on the property in question, Stewart disclosed that the house has a price tag of almost $2 million.

Two days after the mother and her children moved into the brand new structure, they got a rude awakening.

The land owner, NROCC, showed up along with police and served eviction notices on all three houses built in the area of concern.

“They cannot stay there,” declared Phillip Myers, senior manager for land acquisition at NROCC. “I went there and they were already awake and they saw when I was putting the notices there.”

“The land is a very fragile slope to the highway that creates a buttress for the highway works, and they actually dug down the slope [to build the house for the mother and children],” Myers told the Jamaica Observer.

Some have questioned why NROCC waited until after the new house was built to serve the eviction notices.

Myers, however, explained that he acted as quickly as possible.

“Every month we do inspections of our properties. We have previously provided notices to quit on somebody who was on that same property, who moved. On one of our inspections we became aware that persons were now putting up a structure. By the time we got the notice and presented it on the property, the structure was already finished,” he said.

Myers warned that other people “will suffer the same fate” if caught occupying the property in the future.

In the meantime, Councillor for the Treadways Division in the St Catherine Municipal Corporation, Sydney Rose, said it is “very dangerous” for the family to live in the house considering its proximity to Highway 2000.

“They built the house right under the foot of the highway. God forbids a car or bus drop off the highway, everybody get squash and dead in that house,” he cautioned.

“Over time, once you disturb the footing of the highway, you are going to have erosion and the highway is going to collapse – worse if there is going to be continuous use of water,” Rose further lamented.

The councillor also noted that no approval was sought from the St Catherine Municipal Corporation before the houses were built.