WESTMORELAND, Jamaica — Chrissincia Kelly, mother of six-year-old Jadaine Miller who was shot and killed yesterday in the community of Harmony Town in Westmoreland was lost for words when OBSERVER ONLINE visited the family home today. 

People’s National Party Councillor Caretaker of the Savanna-la-Mar North Division, Jullian Chang, reassured the family that counselling will be provided for the adults and children in the yard. 

What was a regular day of play turned into a gruesome ordeal when a 15-year-old cousin of the deceased was playing with a gun that went off, the bullet hitting Jadaine in his chest. He was rushed to the Savanna-la-Mar Public General Hospital where he was pronounced dead. The teen fled the scene.

Jadaine, a student of the Unity Primary School in the parish was seen as a cooperative student who did well in school. 

Chang, who recently launched a trauma line for domestic abuse, told OBSERVER ONLINE, “I often visit this community every three days. It’s a very quiet community. But it sometimes have outbursts of violence, not often caused by residents of the community but from neighbouring communities.”

“The crime situation we [Westmoreland] are facing is too much,” she opined, “I don’t think the lockdown or the state of emergencies are helping, we have to tackle it from a different point of view. We have to get into the communities. Even have some community policing.”

As it regards the age group of many of the people committing these crimes, Chang stated, “Like I said, we have to start very early, we have to start from the schools and also the break-down in the social structures have really disintegrated into this kind of behaviour.” 

Jadaine’s death has been added to the list of gun-related deaths in the parish. Since the start of the year, Westmoreland has been experiencing a 16 per cent increase in murders with gun violence leading the fray with an increase of 16.2 per cent.

Rosalee Wood