It was almost the end of Ian Blake’s shift.

Preparing to head home, Blake was fixing something in his car outside of his place of work on Eureka Road in St Andrew, on Wednesday, March 4, 2020, when a man walked up behind him and shot him in the head twice.

Since then, his wife Gloria Tait Blake has been left living in fear and hoping that the murder will be demystified. The woman moved out of their matrimonial home of six years the same night he was murdered.

“I don’t live at the house anymore. The same night him dead, a the same night me move. And it was a house that we just fixed up and wanted to enjoy now. I just left it. I left because I am scared. I don’t know why he died and I don’t know if anybody is out for me too. So, I just take away myself,” Tait Blake told the Jamaica Observer last Monday.

“And that’s it. I’m not aware of him and anybody having anything or so. I don’t know if him and anybody had anything and he didn’t tell me. It is just like that. I don’t know. The police never did anything. They never did a thing… it was like they were confused themselves. If I am even going on the road, I charter somebody to carry me. I was scared. And even now, I am just scared to pass his workplace. I passed there the other day and I didn’t even want to look over there. I’m just scared,” she continued.

The couple lived together for seven years before getting married, and Blake was a father figure to his wife’s four children.

“Sometimes they [family] are still sad. It’s an on and off thing. It is rough but I have to just take it easy. Up to now I don’t know what happened. It was a good relationship. We did everything together. We went shopping together, eat together, everything. Every little thing. The only thing we don’t do together is work. We had a very close and happy relationship,” Tait Blake related.

Tanisha Rose, Blake’s step daughter, who saw him four days prior to his murder, remembers him as “decent”.

“When I bought my house, he came with my mother to help clean the entire house. He was also there when I got pregnant and got very sick. He came with my mother to help cook because I was in bed. He played a big role in my wedding and he was so proud of me when I bought a house, got married, bought a car and when I got pregnant. He was by my house the Saturday before he was killed,” Rose told the Sunday Observer.

“He wanted food and to watch a movie, so I gave him baked chicken with rice and put on a movie for him. He is normally in a hurry, but that day he wasn’t. Now I look back, I wonder if he felt something was going to happen. I have not been coping well but I’ve learnt to just live as if he’s still by his house and I haven’t seen him in a while. I’ve found myself driving and seen men I thought was him and I break down in tears. I told my brother and he shared that he also struggles with the same,” she continued.

Rose added that when someone you know is sick and they die, you are extremely hurt, but a part of you would have been somehow preparing. But that wasn’t her experience.

“When someone you told ‘see you soon’ and literally meant see you next Sunday, so you can find out the gender if your grandchild is killed and you didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye and you don’t know why, every part of your world breaks down. They say things get better as time progresses, but for me, it gets worse. I am only reminded that he’s missing out more and more; things that he would be crazy about, like my little girl or my sister buying a car,” she related, noting that he had a closer relationship with her older brother and youngest sister; both of whom called him dad. She expressed that their hurt is far greater than her’s.

Meanwhile, Tait Blake told the Sunday Observer that her husband would usually leave work at 5:00 pm each day. But some time after 4:30 pm on March 4, she received a phone call from doctors at Kingston Public Hospital (KPH).

“They said they were calling about Ian Blake. I asked them what it was about, and they said it is nothing bad and I should just come. My son was saying when you get a call from hospital, it never something good. I was thinking that maybe it was an accident. Gunshot was the last thing I was thinking about,” she recalled.

Tait Blake said she got ready, after which she and her son drove to the hospital. Still believing it was an accident, she checked the parking lot for her husband’s vehicle.

“I went everywhere in the car park and I saw a car exactly like his, but it wasn’t. It was a different licence plate,” she said.

By that time, her theory of an accident started falling apart. She then went to the emergency section of the hopsital and saw a number of her husband’s co-workers present. Upon her inquiry, they remained tight-lipped.

“I saw some of his co-workers, but nobody was telling me anything. All I was getting was ‘Me can’t tell you anything’ from them. All I asked what happened; they kept saying that they can’t tell me. So, I started getting nervous.”

Shortly after, medical professionals invited her into an unoccupied room.

“I think it was three nurses and two doctors. When I went in there, they were asking if I was alright. Then they started telling me that Ian came in with gunshot wounds. When they opened their mouths and tell me that, I just went into shock. They are talking but I don’t know exactly what they are saying. They just continued to talk,” she related.

They then handed her his belongings — a phone and a wedding band among other things. Up to that point, Tait Blake told the Sunday Observer, she still didn’t understand that her husband was dead.

“When one of the doctors said that he was pronounced dead, me reach into a different dimension. They were saying I should identify his body and I told them that I can’t. My son went and did it and when he was coming back, I just saw when he fainted. I couldn’t manage,” she stated.