DUMFRIES, St James — A lonely dog still intent on protecting its home barked raucously on Monday though its owner Icilda “Miss Icy” James was no longer alive to benefit from its robust defence. The elderly woman’s badly decomposed body, initially mistaken for rubbish Hurricane Beryl washed into a gully, was discovered in Dumfries, St James, Saturday afternoon.

“I actually saw it from Thursday morning, but I didn’t know it was a body because normally when rain falls and things come down from that side a lot of things settle [in the pond] and bank up. So we thought it was just rubbish,” said Daciann Shaw, who lives across the road from the pond where the elderly woman’s body was recovered. “But gradually it started swelling so it started becoming bigger and by becoming bigger it started forming up like a human being because the lady is a very small, old lady. But Saturday morning I was sitting on my veranda looking out at it. It was there for a while, but I said, ‘No, man,’… By looking and looking I said that look like a dead body.”

Shaw’s theory was confirmed after a drone was sent up over the pond and the body spotted.

Like other community members, she theorised that the elderly woman went to her gate and was swept away by the water in a flooded trench which empties out into the pond.

Icilda James’ lonely dog on her veranda Monday.

The pond from which Icilda James’ body was retrieved Saturday afternoon.

“My conclusion is that she is a old woman, she lives by herself, there is a trench at her gateway. To me the place dark, electricity gone. Probably she came out to buy something and lost her step and fell in the trench,” she opined.Residents in the community last saw James alive on Wednesday as they braced for the approaching storm.

She was in her 90s.

According to her sister, Amy Campbell, who lives in the neighbouring community of Lima, when they heard that James had not been seen after the hurricane, a family member went to check on her Friday night and discovered that two back doors of her empty house were open.

Amy Campbell is mourning the loss of her sister’s life.

“They don’t make any alarm, because it was night. Saturday morning now my son and my daughter go and start searching; all the police come up here and search for her,” added a teary-eyed Campbell.

They even contacted a relative in Montego Bay to ask if James, who was becoming senile, was there.

Campbell is having a hard time coping with her sister’s passing. So too is community member Jeffery Barron who helped firefighters recover James’s body from the pond. He was among those who spoke highly of the elderly woman.

“Mi always pass her, and she was even telling mi she want to sell mi the house,” Barron told reporters.

A man who only gave his name as Carlos, recounted speaking with her on Tuesday.

“Mi see her and talk to her, and she told me she not remembering things and asked me if I know anybody could rent a part of the place because she said she lonely,” he said.

An undated picture of the late Icilda James

“Mi just feel a way because mi a go work the morning and mi don’t even know say she missing. It tragic! Is mi little friend; you done know how old people miserable, but is mi friend. She have a good heart,” he said.Tony, a businessman from the area, expressed similar sentiments.

“She is a woman who if she hear say anything a give away she a mek sure say everyone get. Whether government or private [sector], from she hear say something a give away what people can get, she not hiding it. She a tell you to go and look,” he said.

The house where Icilda ‘Miss Icy’ James lived.

Member of Parliament for St James East Central Edmund Bartlett, who on Sunday visited James’s grief-stricken relatives, expressed regret at her tragic passing.

“I am saddened by the passing of Miss Icy. I extend my deepest condolences to members of her family,” he told the Jamaica Observer during a telephone interview.