MANDEVILLE, Manchester — A Manchester mother is appealing to the authorities to urgently address the issue of homeless mentally ill people after her daughter was punched by a man, believed to be of unsound mind, on a Mandeville street last week.

Stacey-Ann Peart told the Jamaica Observer that her 18-year-old daughter was walking on Manchester Road last Tuesday when the man attacked her.

“She had an encounter, which is not the first with this person. I made a video of him, which I did to show someone who it is that I have a problem with on the street. There are a lot of them, but this one did something to my daughter that I cannot take lightly, and there are other parents and children,” Peart said on Saturday.

“She was walking with her three-year-old sister and she was punched in the tummy. I am asking someone, ‘Please to do something with these people on the road… I just want them to come off the street because it doesn’t have to be my child, it could be your child,’ ” said Peart, who shared that her daughter was in pain for days.

“Sometimes she say she feels like the pain is moving, but I just hope that no damage is there because she is saying the pain is not as bad right now,” Peart added.

“Whosoever is seeing this — politicians or anybody at all — please take them off the road. It could have been serious… She is afraid to walk on the road right now,” the mother said.

“It could have been that she was stabbed, because the day when I encountered him and asked him about the whole situation his reply was he, ‘should have broken a knife in her’. That is what he said. I know that teenagers, at times, are very troublesome but not my daughter. She is not a troublesome person. He wasn’t provoked or anything by her,” Peart insisted.

She said that in the previous encounter her daughter had with the man, he almost headbutted her.

Councillor Mario Mitchell (People’s National Party, Bellefield Division), who is also chair of Manchester Municipal Corporation Health Committee, said that incident, and others, have been brought to his attention.

“There are incidents… where these persons of unsound mind have attacked people moving freely across Manchester, and we are concerned about it and we want to see if we can act quickly before something tragic happens,” he said.

When asked what the municipal corporation is doing to remedy the situation Mitchell was cautious, saying that the council alone cannot address the problem.

“We have started the dialogue and, as we said, we cannot confine the persons of unsound mind to a space, based on the laws that now currently exist, so we are asking that something be done — a provision of an amendment be done to see how best we can go forward in dealing with people of unsound mind,” he said.

“A number of citizens have reached out to us as councillors about the homelessness and the so-called people of unsound mind in the town of Mandeville. The population seems to be increasing, and there are some concerns about the mental capacity of these people. Some of them become violent, and I have gotten complaints from parents of students from schools across Mandeville where some of the [homeless] men and women have attacked students, women and the elderly,” he added.

He also pointed to the number of stray dogs accompanying the homeless and mentally ill.

“Some of these homeless persons have a few dogs, and they have multiplied and are attacking people. We are very concerned about that. We are making every step to ensure that we do something about it… but our hands are tied as we don’t have a pound; we don’t have the facility to care for those animals. We are asking for the intervention of the relevant stakeholders,” Mitchell told the Observer.

He also said he has been reaching out to animal welfare groups for assistance.

“We have contacted the Jamaica Society [for the Prevention] of Cruelty to Animals to seek their intervention with the stray dogs and we are not getting to where we want to get. The society said to me that they are working in Kingston and the metropolitan area and as far as Portmore, but the rural areas — like Manchester — are not getting that support. So, we have started the discussion. I am hoping that we can get some assistance with the stray dogs because they are becoming a problem,” he said.