THE Government has pledged to compensate the parents of Orane Williams, the 13-year-old boy who was accidentally shot dead by a policeman’s bullet in downtown Kingston on March 5.

Orane was buried yesterday after a funeral service at the Hagley Park Road Seventh-day Adventist Church in Kingston, attended by National Security Minister, Peter Phillips and the tourism minister, Portia Simpson Miller, the parliamentary representative for South West St Andrew, the constituency in which the Williams family lives. Senior police officers were also present.

Students of the John Mills All-Age School, which Orane attended, filed past his purple and white casket and paid tribute to their former schoolmate in song.

Outside the church, Phillips comforted Orane’s parents — his father, Leonard Williams and mother Carmale Green — and, as he had done before, expressed his regret at the incident.

Afterwards, he told the Observer that the Government would negotiate compensation once the parents were ready.

“They are going to be discussing with the attorney-general and their lawyers for compensation to be worked out immediately and this will be done as soon as they are ready,” Phillips said.

Police said Orane, on his way home after school, was shot in the head while a policeman tussled with a man accused of earlier snatching a woman’s handbag in the nearby St William Grant Park. The man escaped, but the incident caused a spontaneous demonstration by people who lit fires in the road and stoned buses.

Yesterday, Orane was eulogised by his godmother, Shernette Whyte, as a “spontaneous, bright, supportive young man” who had “great ideas of what he wanted to become in life”.

Simpson Miller started her tribute to the youngster but became too overwrought to continue. Before the tears, though, she had managed to say that the loss of an innocent life was another signal for Jamaican unity to stamp out crime.

Pastor A Cotterell struck a similar theme in his sermon, urging Jamaicans not to tolerate crime and lawlessness.

Said he: “You can’t sit back and allow hooligans and megalomaniacs to take over the country. Everyone must come together and fight against crime and violence, which is stalking the land. We must be willing to prevent it, even if doing so it will cause us our death.”

But Phillips also accepted that the security forces, too, had behaved in a manner to strength the environment in which criminals can be isolated. In a tribute at the service, the security minister broadly appealed for respect for life, but stressed the obligation of members of the security forces “to protect, to the greatest extent, the lives of every Jamaican”.

In a separate interview, Phillips underlined the need for a re-organisation of the way the police operated in situations such as in the incident in which Orane was killed.

“They have to protect the lives of all the people — by-standers and everyone,” he said, adding that arrangements were being made for the re-training of cops in the use of firearms.

“This is one of the things we are focusing on — training them immediately,” Phillips said.