Modern day horror
FRIENDLY faces and ready smiles greet visitors to Top Albany, a sleepy district in St Mary. But behind this harmless visage, lurks a horrific tale of abject human pain and suffering and stomach-churning scenes.
Virtually imprisoned in a three-bedroom house, a sick teenage girl languishes — dirty, hungry and a victim of repeated sexual and physical abuse. She eats her bodily waste and lies for days at a time in her mess in this modern day horror story.
People in the area call her “mad”, but family members insist that she suffers from epilepsy.
The girl’s father, who resides in Kingston, is alleged to have disowned her and her mother ‘drops by every couple of months’.
Efforts by the Sunday Observer to contact the girl’s parents were unsuccessful.
“Daddy doesn’t care: He said she is not his pickney. And we will go for months without seeing mommy,” says a distraught Shauna Lewis, sister of the sick girl, in an interview last week.
Lewis, 20, who has a two-week-old baby girl, does not live at the house, and commutes between Kingston and St Mary.
Because the young girl has been left on her own with no one to care for her, relatives say, they are forced to lock her inside the house to “keep her safe from herself”, as well as from the sexual and physical abuse.
“We have to lock her in because she escapes and jumps through the window, and when she stray, them beat her and rape her,” Lewis says. “We also have to lock her in because when the (epileptic) fits tek har, she fall down and hurt herself.
“Sometimes people will all see har, and she go provoke them and they will chop har and them something deh. One time, them usually chop chop har up a lot. Every mark you see on har body a somebody chop har, or when she get fits. So that is why we have to lock her up,” Lewis explains apologetically.
But the door unlocks to reveal stomach-turning squalor. Inside, the young girl wallows in her bodily waste; the stench is unbearable. The house is filthy and untidy, and the girl also collects “garbage” around the neighbourhood which she deposits inside the rooms.
“She do-do up (defaecates) herself and everything,” the girl’s cousin, Lisa Wright, remarks. “She messes up herself and she stray away in that condition a lot of times. Even now inside there renk and she mess up herself.”
As if this was not bad enough, the girl’s sister and cousin say she sometimes consumes her bodily waste.
“Night upon night she lock up inside here with no food and she eats her own mess,” Wright complains.
“Why yu won’t stop eat you do-do,” one resident admonishes her after opening the door to release her on the Sunday Observer’s second visit to the area Friday morning. Faecal matter sticks to her teeth, but the youngster is oblivious to the woman’s gentle chiding and begs for food, before making off with a bar of white bath soap.
“She eats everything she can find,” Wright tells this reporter .
And as if to prove this point, the youngster emerges from the house with a bottle of hot pepper sauce and before anyone could stop her, unflinchingly gobbles down a handful of the fiery content.
“Gimme di food fi eat nuh,” the young girl begs, pouting when the bottle is forcibly removed from her hand. She retreats to a nearby bench sucking her thumb.
Close family members are unsure of her age. The girl’s sister says she is “either 15 or 16”; her cousin says she is “about 18”; and her grandfather, Stedman Bloomfield, says she is “older than 16”. The only thing on which they agree is the fact that she was born on May 18.
Her age is important, as this will determine the kind of assistance she is likely to receive from the state.
Whatever her age, it is no constraint to the brutish men who rape the suffering girl at will. Or the persons who beat her mercilessly.
Residents testify that she has been raped and battered on numerous occasions, although no formal complaints have been made to the police.
“If (the girl) stray go down to people place and provoke them, them beat her. When she stray go up the road, them rape har — and you can see when this happens because it is very brutal. She is all messed up… sometimes her vagina swell up and she can’t walk. So we have to lock her inside,” Wright stresses.
“Even the other day we were wondering if is pregnant she pregnant because har belly did swell. But then it went down, and we realise that she probably did drop and lick it up, or something make it swell up,” she added.
The last beating the young girl received occurred during the Easter holidays after she reportedly stole “a half tin of cheese” from a man in the community. “The man beat har bad,” a group of women said.
The girl was also hospitalised a few weeks ago after she was discovered battered on the streets of nearby Annotto Bay. She reportedly had a seizure and injured herself.
“I was staying here in the house with her just before that incident,” Lewis recalls.
She was unable to restrain her younger sister at the time. “I was pregnant and couldn’t manage her. She leave here the Thursday night, and the Friday morning me inside and somebody call me and tell me that them see (her) out a Annotto Bay all blood-up.
“When me go to the hospital to look for her, the whole of her face mash up and scrape up,” an emotional Lewis says.
“Sometimes mi wish something woulda just happen to her and she just dead so nobody can’t do har anything. Because if mi did have it fi keep her, me would keep her where me is, because I don’t like being away from her knowing that she not getting anything, and people hurting her,” she adds, fighting hard to hold back the tears.
But huddled on the bench Tuesday, sucking her thumb, the sick girl presented a picture of a frightened child in need of love and care.
“Shauna, mi want bathe fi go a mi bed go sleep yuh nuh,” she demands repeatedly of her elder sister.
Lloyd Cammock, 58, a neighbour, says he shares his food with her “regularly”.
“I know her from she was a baby, so I cook and give her whenever I have it,” says the bed-ridden Cammock. He notes, however, that the girl had not eaten any food in three days.
He reports that the sick girl’s mother, who had visited the weekend before, did her laundry and cleaned the house. “But she did not even carry little food come give the child,” he complains. When she was leaving, “she give me $50 and ask me fi cook some dumpling and give har”.
Prior to this visit, Cammock said she had not been by to see the child in more than a month.
Between the mother’s infrequent visits, compassionate neighbours, like Cammock, offer the unfortunate girl food and give her an occasional bath. But they, like the girl’s relatives, are hard pressed financially.
But the girl was not always like this. Relatives and neighbours recall when she was a normal, healthy child attending the Water Valley Primary School where she was said to be a promising student.
“She was bright and love har book and pencil… But from she reach nine years old, she just stay like this,” Wright recollects.
Lewis blames her parents and especially her mother for the girl’s plight, saying she was left to be raised by her grandmother who passed away four years ago.
All her five siblings had been similarly given away to be raised by someone else, she hisses
“She nuh raise none of us,” Lewis tells the Sunday Observer. “One night, when me ’bout four she run whey lef wi and gone a dance and mi grandmother send mi aunty dem up a yard fi wi.”
Adds Lewis: “Me nah tell my mother seh my grandmother never love me and care fi me yuh nuh, but mi never want mi grandmother fi grow mi, a she mi did want fi grow me.”
In the meantime, Lewis says her sister’s condition continues to deteriorate, and she is powerless to help her.
“Sometimes she will sit down and start cry. And sometimes she will look at herself in the mirror and just cry. And when you ask, what happen to you, all she do is just cry.”