The mother of one of the five women abducted and assaulted by serial rapist Dewayne Redfin, who for several years terrorised women in St Catherine while posing as a taxi operator, says she feels cheated, as the 11-year sentence handed down to him on July 17 in no way compensates for the recurring nightmare her family has lived since the night of September 5, 2017.

In an interview with the Jamaica Observer following the sentencing, the emotional mother said life with the second of her three children, who was 25 at the time of the incident, changed forever.

“For the first three years after it happened the house was in turmoil because she always felt like somebody was breaking in. In her room we had to buy only dark curtains — the thick blackout curtains — and many nights when I woke up she would be in my bed at my feet, can’t sleep,” the mother told the Observer.

She said her daughter, now in her 30s, despite counselling, constantly battles with fear, a situation which has crippled her professional life to the point where she is unable to hold a stable job, though willing.

“Right now she is not working. She was fired the other day because she was not getting to work early enough,” the mother confided, noting that her daughter, who has not ridden in a taxi alone since, will travel by bus but still feels threatened in an enclosed space surrounded by a sea of unfamiliar faces.

“There is more fear than anything else. I know one day I am going to come out of it, but for her it’s not going to heal right now; there are times when, because of it, she has memory loss. At one point she wore elastic bands on her hands that she would, from time to time, stretch and release to snap herself back to reality. She started forgetting things. I am dying for this nightmare to be over,” she chronicled, noting that a tiny pair of scissors and, of late, a taser, which she carries on her rare trips outside the home, have been a lifeline for her adult child.

“If I could fix it, trust me, I would. There are many times I think of getting a gun and going to the shooting range. I want to send a message to his mother. I want to know if he has children. I can’t imagine that big, tough man violating my daughter, who doesn’t weigh 95 pounds,” she said fiercely, adding that most of the victims were of a similar body type.

She said her pain was made deeper by the fact that months before the incident she had repeat visions of her smallest daughter being hurt.

“The visions were real to the point that I was getting so scared. Every night the same vision coming with my third child, some of it was really terrible, because sometimes I would see blood and it just made me scared to the point where I made sure I went to get her visa so I could take her with me when I travelled for the summer. I was trying to save her because I was visioning her, so I did everything on my part to really protect her,” she told this reporter.

To her horror, it was her second child who, after leaving her workplace that fated September 2017 night, lived the material of her terrifying night visions. To make matters worse she was still off the island when the incident occurred and cannot forget the desperation with which she tried to get a flight out of the United States to be with her daughter. That effort became even more agonising as the flight ended up being cancelled several times because of an impending storm at the time. The upshot was that she did not return to the island until days later.

She said Redfin, who abducted her daughter sometime after 9:00 pm, did not release her until sometime around midnight and only after he had threatened her. That ordeal was made worse when she was taken to Greater Portmore (“100 Man”) Police Station by family members to report the incident. There she was told that she would have to wait until morning before the rape kit could be done.

“That meant she had to stay just the way she was — don’t brush her teeth, don’t do anything, and don’t bathe, nothing at all. Just stay in the same state she was in and come back the next morning. Terrible!” the mother said.

“Someone just violated you and you can’t even clean yourself, you have to stay with that the whole night?” she added, eyes misting, voice fading as she recalled her daughter’s suffering which was compounded by the fact that she (the mother) was overseas at the time.

“That sentence was not fair; I would prefer to hear life in prison. I don’t think it’s fair to the victims. Too many of them [perpetrators] are getting away with it. They are raping babies, 10-year-olds, old people, and they need to stop. It hurts me, every day I look at my daughter I say ‘God, why did it have to happen? How do you get healing from this?’” she continued agonisingly her eyes glazed with tears.

“Mi feel it day and night. There was a time when I couldn’t stop crying. I no longer trust males. I just don’t trust nobody anymore. If mi could fix it, mi fix it,” the distraught mother moaned.

The 37-year-old Redfin, who was later linked to other cases after the incident was reported to the Portmore police, have been behind bars since 2017. He was last month sentenced in the St Catherine Circuit Court by Supreme Court judge Justice Dale Palmer to 11 years’ imprisonment each for five counts of rape, six years each for five counts of grievous sexual assault, five years each for five counts of forcible abduction, and six years’ imprisonment each on three counts of robbery with aggravation. The sentences were ordered to run concurrently.

For the St Catherine mother, Redfin got the better end of the bargain after the court process which, she said, was riddled with mishaps and gross mismanagement of the victims who, although their statements were entered as evidence, did not get to take the stand, though willing, as Redfin had pleaded guilty.

“There are so many things, so many questions we want to ask that we don’t know who to ask,” she told the Observer, her elfin face a study in distress.

Redfin, after pleading guilty in October 2024, had withdrawn his plea until June this year when he again owned up to the crimes.

According to her, however, the system had been manipulated by the convicted man from the beginning and at one point justice seemed to be about to slip through their grasp.

“The case kept getting put off. It was either that he didn’t have an attorney or something. This continued for a while; it just became long and drawn out and my daughter was saying he would get off. This kept happening until last year. By this the other ladies weren’t turning up,” she said.

Desperate to ensure that the rapist got his just punishment, the mother said she tried to form a bond with the other victims she was aware of, the focus being to ensure that Redfin would be put away for a good while.

“That man is a sick man. I think it’s a graduation thing for him. I think he tried it once and he got away and then… he got away with it again so he kept trying,” she said while calling for other victims who had not pressed their cases to come forward.

Redfin’s sentencing came just days after that of a 44-year-old St Catherine-based taxi driver who, after pleading guilty to routinely raping and trafficking his underage daughter and stepdaughter over several years, was given more than three decades behind bars for those crimes.

That cab driver was also slapped with a similar sentence for raping another child, his next-door neighbour, around the same period of time. The sentences for the crimes against all three girls amount to just over 100 years. However, the sentences will run concurrently, making it so that he will serve the longest of the lot, which is 33 years and eight months behind bars before he can apply for parole.

This Sunday: The daughter speaks.