BY HORACE HINES Observer West reporter
Saturday, October 11, 2014
REFUGE, Trelawny — As the Trelawny police intensified their probe into the suspected murder of 13-year-old Muchett High student Aliesha Brown, Assistant Commissioner of Police Devon Watkis has said that investigators are awaiting forensic evidence to determine if the teenager was raped before she was killed.
“The matter is being given full attention by detectives probing the matter. However, due to the state of the body at the time of discovery, it could not be ascertained if she was raped,” ACP Watkis told the Jamaica Observer West yesterday.
Speculation is rife that young Aliesha was brutally raped, then killed, before her body was dumped in bushes in the Stewart Castle area, not far from the Refuge community where she resided.
The police say the body was found covered with a motor car bumper, clad in her Muschett High school uniform with stab wounds to the neck and chest, while the face was bashed by what appears to be with a stone.
A shoelace was also reportedly tied around the neck.
The grisly find has plunged the entire Refuge community – which was established as one of the island’s first free villages established after slavery – into a state of shock and mourning.
Aliesha, affectionately called ‘Miss Chin, a grade eight student, left home about 6:00am on Monday, September 29, to be on time for the morning shift at her school in Wakefield, Trelawny, about 14 miles away.
She did not arrive. Her lifeless body was discovered two days later.
The young girl’s grandmother, Patricia Williams, who told the Jamaica Observer West earlier this week that Aliesha’s shoes and school bag are still missing, strongly believes that her granddaughter
was abducted in the Refuge community while on her way to the bus stop – near the entrance to the community – on a section of the leg of the North Coast Highway, which runs from Duncans to Falmouth.
“She didn’t reach at the end of the road because a little boy who she generally travels with was at the bus stop and never see her none at all,” said the grieving grandmother.
Other members of the community said they were still trying to find answers for the killing.
“The girl deh too nice fe dead. Them people deh no fe dead so. Boy, it better we did hear seh she crash and dead,” one man argued. “The girl is a godly girl, she gone a heaven. Me want know why them don’t make the pickney them grow.”
Williams in the meantime, recounted that her granddaughter was a loving and pleasant child, who wanted to become a soldier.
“She always say, ‘Mommy, me want get big and when me get big me ago turn soldier and me ago take care of you’,” Williams recounted, as she wept uncontrollably. “Miss Chin is loved by a lot of people. She loved old people, she loved babies. She was so friendly, she always has a smile. I just can see her smiling. No matter what trouble she in, she always smile.”
Still fresh in the minds of area residents is last year’s grotesque killing of 16-
year-old Holland High student Abigail Robb, whose body was found in a cane field, five days after she was abducted from her home by two gunmen.
One member of the district expressed that the deaths of the two students have occurred because the men in the community have dropped their guards and are allowing strangers to invade the area at will.
“Refuge was a nice place and all of a sudden some unbelievable things a tek place. We used to protect the community before, you know, and them say we a extortionists and this and that. So we just leggo the corner. A so come the pickney them a get tek weh. No pickney couldn’t get tek way down the road,” said the irate resident.
Meanwhile, president of the Trelawny Neighbourhood Watch Divisional Council Desiree Gobern Vernon, is imploring community members to tell the police what they know.
“We urge us all, let’s join hands and hearts and take back our community from criminals. It’s time to rid ourselves from the monkey syndrome See no evil! Hear no evil! Speak no evil!” she said.
“We often say ” I can’t trust no police. Citizens, there must be one police in the entire country that can be trusted,” Gobern Vernon appealed.
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Refuge mourns Aliesha
