Slain St Mary brothers to be buried together
GAYLE, St Mary — As relatives of Devon and Orville Ellis prepare to lay them to rest on May 26, they cannot help but wonder why a gunman abruptly cut the two brothers’ lives short.
Their grief is that much harder to bear as the men, 60 and 45, respectively, were killed only seven months after their elder brother, Bernard Ellis, died after being diagnosed with COVID-19.
“They were fine, hard-working guys; they were not troublemakers,” said a close relative whose name is being withheld for security reasons.
The brothers were shot in Gayle’s Labrynth district on the night of March 21. They had just eaten dinner and were relaxing inside Devon’s house when a man walked in and shot them multiple times.
Orville died two days later, Devon hung on for another three before he too succumbed to his injuries.
The shooter remains at large.
“Words cannot express how the family is feeling right now,” the relative of the slain men told the Jamaica Observer on Wednesday. “We are distraught; we are very, very distraught.”
The brothers were participants in the Government’s overseas employment programme, working seasonally on farms in the United States.
“They didn’t even live to enjoy the fruit of their labour; they just built their little house and were just about to try to relax now, but somebody just came and took their lives away like that,” the family member lamented. “They didn’t leave one another company; they were very close.”
Their final resting place will be beside each other, in Labrynth.