Shamar Small (left) and his brother Shakene Small who were abandoned at the Hunt's Bay Police Station in Kingston on Tuesday. (Observer file photo)

THE parents of the two boys who were allegedly abandoned at the Hunts Bay Police Station in St Andrew on Tuesday were arrested and charged yesterday.

According to Sergeant Lovena Edwards, the children's 25-year-old mother Yanieke Thompson, of Maxfield Avenue in Kingston, and their father Christopher Small, 36, an employee of Comfortair Engineering Limited, were arrested shortly after noon when Small turned up at the station making queries about his sons.

"He came here asking about them, that's when we arrested him and took him to the mother's house where we picked her up," Sergeant Edwards told the Observer.

Yanieke Thompson and Christopher Small, parents of six-year-old Shakene Small and five-year-old Shamar Small, at the Hunt's Bay Police Station in Kingston yesterday. The two boys were left at the station on Tuesday. (Photo: Karl McLarty)

But despite being slapped with charges of the abandonment of the boys, neither parent accepted responsibility for leaving them at the station.

Both boys were left to sit on a concrete block outside the police station, but Small said yesterday that he had no idea that his sons were there until a family member informed him about the report in the Observer.

"I never knew that my sons were here; I have not seen them since I left them with their mother," the man said. "I just hear that police have my youth them."

While officers were processing the two, who obviously had bad blood brewing between them, a handful of persons gathered at the station door and gave them a tongue lashing.

"How me can carry my pickney for nine months and come dash him way; I don't care what kind of father them have or how I am going to feed them, I not throwing away my youth," one woman shouted, before she was ordered away from the station by a police officer.

According to Thompson, who sat silently through the ordeal, she left the boys at Small's girlfriend's house after they were taken to her by him without any money.

She said that it was out of frustration that she had left them at the house where they slept on the verandah the night before they were taken to the police station.

"Me carry them go left them over him woman yard because him a carry them come give me without leaving any money to buy food for them to eat," said Thompson angrily.

The woman, who said she is unemployed, added that she was also nursing a one-year-old baby at her one-room dwelling in Maxfield Avenue.

Late yesterday afternoon she was transferred to the Duhaney Park lock-up, while Small was escorted by officers to the lock-up area at Hunts Bay. Both are to appear in court on Monday.

The boys - six-year-old Shakene Small and Shamar Small, five - who since late Tuesday afternoon have been accommodated at the Walker's Place of Safety in Kingston, were on Wednesday offered full tuition, lunches and uniforms to the Hydel Group of Schools by Senator Hyacinth Bennett, president of the institution.

Late yesterday afternoon Errol Brennan, chief executive officer of Sunshine Auto Parts Limited and vice-president of the St Elizabeth Homecoming Organisation, offered to make a contribution of a $100,000 to the boys.

"I read the story and was very touched by it; I just thought I could offer some help to them," Brennan told the Observer.

Shaggy & Friends take a bow

Two-day Gathering of the Peacemaker in Negril

Patrons rang in the New Year with gusto at 11:59