IN four days it will be five years since the disappearance of visually impaired student of The University of the West Indies (The UWI) Jasmine Deen. Her father, Lloyd, believes she’s still alive, but the police say there’s nothing new in her case.

However, Lloyd refuses to harbour any thoughts or suggestions that she could be dead.

Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Stephanie Lindsay, who heads the Constabulary Communications Network, told the Jamaica Observer yesterday that detectives have no new leads in their investigation into the young woman’s disappearance.

“We don’t have any new updates in terms of the investigations the last time I checked. No new leads,” said Lindsay.

It is Deen’s belief that his daughter was taken away to another country against her will.

“I feel somebody took her away to a different country and is using her. A lot of youth go online and you don’t know who they are talking to. I can’t see anything or hear anything. It is hard for me to think she is dead,” he told the Sunday Observer last week.

“It feels like it was just yesterday since she went missing. I feel worse and worse every day. Sometimes you think it is going to get better, but it is not getting better. At the same time, you can’t really be negative. They say seeing is believing, and I have to see this one to believe that she is dead.

“Every day I still look and listen out if somebody is going to come and tell me something. When other people lose their loved ones, everybody hear how their relative died, so I am wondering what really happened. Somebody carry her gone somewhere and have her. A lot of people die and they are found, even if it is in a shallow grave. Look at even the girl in St Thomas, recently, she was missing and by the next two days they found her dead in bushes,” Deen said, expressing confidence that his daughter could very well still be alive.

While reminiscing on how he struggled to raise Jasmine and care for her up to when she disappeared, Dean could not hold back the tears while talking to the Sunday Observer. He said that if Jasmine was not trafficked out of the island, he would find it very difficult to understand why anyone would choose to harm or, even worse, kill her.

“It is hard when you have your innocent daughter and within yourself you don’t see what you did as a father for that to happen to her. I have not done wrong to anybody. All I know is that I raised four children, because their mother died when they were babies. I alone raised them. When their mother died, Jasmine did not even start school yet. She was seven years old and she wasn’t going to school because she was partially blind. She was born with glaucoma.

“When she was six months old, I realised; I saw her looking up, her eyes were pretty but the way she was looking up you could tell that she was not seeing that well. When we brought her to the doctor, that was how we found out she had glaucoma that grows. If you don’t do the operation before she was one or two, then she would have been fully blind.

“They said it was $90,000 to do the operation. I went overseas when she was about one year old and made $100,000. I spent $90,000 on her operation. Only one eye came back with some sort of good result, [so] she started to glimpse out of one eye. The other eye, she wasn’t seeing out of it any at all,” he recalled.

The father shared that he got Jasmine into the Salvation Army School for the Blind, fearful that she would’ve been teased by other children had she been placed in the regular school system.

“I boarded her at the Salvation Army for six years. When she wanted to come home, I went for her or I sent my big daughter for her. I never allowed her to travel by herself at all. More time the principal help me, because when him see seh mi can’t pay, him tell me to allow her to stay same way. She was bright. She was a star. She sang for them — the brightest at the School for the Blind. She got eight subjects at School for the Blind and qualified for Meadowbrook High School sixth form.

“Meadowbrook was $120,000 for the year. She had to board, plus the school fees and the fees for her subjects had to be paid. I had a piece of land and I said I would sell it just to make her go to school. She then qualified for The University of the West Indies.

“She joined a group called the ambassador group, and she got a visa and went to New York. When she was leaving, I was begging the other girls to take care of her for me, because I was fretting. I was wondering how she would survive, but she was brilliant; she was about 18 at the time. She graduated from Salvation Army and then she went to Meadowbrook and did two years,” he shared with the Sunday Observer.

He believes enough wasn’t done to find his daughter or properly punish two men who, in 2020, were arrested and charged for having in their possession Jasmine’s cellphone and her bank card.

The two men were 42-year-old Tamar Henry, otherwise called Braff and Lavish of Bull Bay, St Andrew, and 36-year-old Gregor Wright, otherwise called ‘G’.

Wright and Henry were charged with possession of identity information, eight counts of unauthorised access to computer data and simple larceny. Henry was also charged with breaches of the Dangerous Drugs Act.

In May 2021 the director of public prosecutions ruled that Henry and Wright should not be charged with murder, as the evidence against them did not meet the threshold.

Five years later, Deen still has a lot of questions.

“I think enough investigation wasn’t done. They charged Vybz Kartel without finding Clive “Lizard” Williams’ body, and he did almost 13 years in prison. If you find two persons with her things, they must know something about it,” the dad reasoned. “To me, the whole thing is like a set-up…You can’t go into a phone that is locked and you don’t have the code to pull it. You can’t use the ATM [automated teller machine] card without the pin number. They must have got the information from her. How you get the pin number?”

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