IN the space of a day, a four-year-old girl lost her mother, a younger, unborn sibling and her stepfather. The girl’s mental burden started last Sunday after she discovered her pregnant mother’s body shortly after 2 o’clock in Rhoden Hall, Clarendon.

Psychologist Dr Leahcim Semaj told the Jamaica Observer that the series of traumatic events is too much for a four-year-old. Semaj said the girl is in need of prolonged counselling, sooner rather than later.

“It is a long bereavement. That child clearly can’t go without hearing the things that other relatives and people around her are saying and talking about. So, that will give her even more information to personalise it. That child is going to need long-term counselling. Not just to forget, and not just one or two sessions. No,” Semaj emphasised in an interview.

“This is shock, confusion. There is disbelief, there is denial, there is sadness, there is despair and almost still waiting and asking ‘When mommy going to wake up, when mommy going to come.’ It’s going to take a while for the child to fully come to grips with it,” he added, noting that children’s understanding of death varies.

“They can understand ‘gone’, some do understand death. Some may see it as sleep. It takes a while.”

The girl discovered her mother’s body on her bed with a slashed throat at their home on Sunday, June 20. The woman identified as 25-year-old Tasheika McKay was eight months pregnant. According to police reports, the child then went next door and told her maternal grandmother that her mother was motionless and unresponsive.

“The younger the child, the less clear the child is at the moment. Younger children may not understand the totality of it. Oftentimes, people around them will protect them,” Semaj said of the child seeing her mother’s body in such a state.

Further, 20-year-old Markland Hayles, who is believed to be McKay’s spouse, was taken into custody on Sunday, escaping the wrath of irate residents who blamed him for the gruesome killing. He was later named by police as the main suspect in McKay’s murder.

But things took a drastic turn the following day. On Monday morning, Hayles, a farmer of Mason River district in the parish, was found hanging in his cell at Lionel Town Police Station also in Clarendon, sometime after 11 o’clock.

“We can confirm that he hanged himself using a piece of clothing he had on at the time of the arrest. We are still working on ascertaining the full details of the case,” a police source told the Sunday Observer.

The police reported that during the distribution of meals, Hayles, who was reportedly the only inmate in the cell at the time, was seen hanging from the back vent grill of the cell by a cord and a merino. He was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Moreover, the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) has since started an investigation into the circumstances under which the 20-year-old died.

In the meantime, Semaj has pleaded to the family to spare the child any additional and unnecessary details.

“The child doesn’t need the gory details. Don’t give children more information than they can process. It’s just not necessary. It’s easier for a child to understand that somebody was sick and died. But then ‘This man killed mommy and then he killed himself.’ It is a lot to process. The child needs to be protected from this,” he lamented. “And even if the child is not the man’s child there would still be a connection, because he is the mother’s partner.”

Semaj told the Sunday Observer that the girl also lost a younger sibling she would’ve been expecting for a while.

“There would’ve been much talk and plan. ‘I am going to have a little brother or a little sister’ and all of that. Some nice conversations are necessary with that child to help her regain faith in humanity,” he said.

Another reason why the child needs counselling, Semaj added, is because children concoct many altered realities to cope with tragedy.

“This is one of the strange ways children deal with the death of a parent… let’s say the child was upset with the mother for something simple. They wanted to go somewhere or wanted candy and didn’t get it and, shortly after, they find the mother dead. There are children who spend a long time thinking that it is their fault their parent died.”