SPALDING, Clarendon — There was something odd, in a good way, about the last day 42-year-old Melisa Claire Wright spent with her family at her mother’s house in Ritchies, Clarendon.

“She spent the whole day with us, cooked our dinner and our breakfast. We played bingo… and listen music and she leave about after seven in the night. It was just different. She and my grandmother even eat out of the same plate and we laugh and had a good time. Normally she would talk about work but this time she didn’t speak about anything work related. She just spent genuine time with us,” her son, Ryan Francis told the Jamaica Observer.

Two hours later, Wright, the owner of Rest Heaven funeral home, was dead. She was shot in the head by armed men who invaded her house at Cumberland District in Spalding, Clarendon, on June 1. Wright was at home with her husband and their children — two boys aged 15 and 18, and three girls aged 14 (Wright’s stepdaughter), 11 and seven.

When the armed men’s demand for money was not met they shot Wright. Her husband fled and hid in nearby bushes. The children were not harmed.

The police were subsequently summoned and Wright was transported to hospital where she was pronounced dead.

Weeks have passed but Ryan Francis still cannot believe his mother is dead.

“Even now I wonder if I’m just in a long dream because it don’t feel real,” he said.

When the calls first started coming in about her death, he said he thought he was being pranked.

“Then me start getting more calls so I realise it was true and I ran out of my house barefooted. Then one of my cousin come and pick me up and carry me up there. When I reach, the police was already there so, I just had to sit outside I couldn’t get to see her,” said the 22-year-old.

He said his siblings have been traumatised by the incident may need receiving counselling.

“My smaller sister has to stop from school because it is taking a toll on her; she say she is not ready [to go back] yet. I’m just staying strong for them since I’m the bigger one because they need me now more than anything,” Francis said.

His grandmother has also been hard hit by the death of her child.

“She does dialysis every Monday and Thursday and my mother would take her and make sure everything is going well. So even on Monday when there was no mommy to pick her up, she feel it,” said Francis.

He cannot understand why anyone would hurt his mother, whom he described as the most selfless person he knew.

“My mother was a great woman, kind and genuine. She was like a mother to everybody; even other people who is not her children call her mommy. She is always helping people. If someone in the community ask her for money and she don’t have it she will ask someone else for it just so she can help the person. She went out of her way for people,” he said, adding that Wright showered her children with just as much love and attention.

“She loved her children dearly, she go all out for her kids and she is always around and try to make us have the best of everything. Even the other day she left work and spend the whole day with me, trying to help me sort out my licence in Kingston. She was there every step of the way, which I always appreciate,” Francis told the Observer.