AUDREY ANDERSON still weeps for her ‘baby’
DAVYTON, Manchester:
“WHE GAIL deh? You see her?” “Yes, me see her.” “Wah happen to her? Anuh dead she dead?” “Yes ... she dead! “The confirmation. Those three words spoken to 76-year-old Audrey Anderson and her husband Walde, almost a year ago, shook their core and are still fresh in their memory as it brought a nightmare to reality.
Anderson had a special love for and a special connection with her daughter, the fifth of eight children, Gail, whose life was tragically snuffed out by the man all expected her to marry.
“A friend of Gail was calling her phone but wasn’t getting her, and she asked me to call her, but I never got any answer. So I sent my son down there, but he said he didn’t see anybody, just the car. Even when he jumped over the gate, he couldn’t see anything ...” the mother recounted
TRAGIC DISCOVERY
“I told one of my daughters to go down there and ask my other daughter to follow her to go and look. When they went there, one of my daughters pulled the mesh from the window to look inside.”
In shock, and with no knowledge of how they would break the news to their mother, the sisters refused to answer Anderson’s calls.
“I called them again and again. I asked my husband to call and he was hesitant, and me get miserable now and tell him fi ‘call dem!’ My daughter answered the phone, but she didn’t know I was hearing everything from an opened line. Me hear when she say, ‘Yes, daddy, she dead.” Anderson fainted. “Me just a collar myself a try hold up, but I couldn’t. Me bellow out to me friend across the road and me just drop dung right on the verandah. When I came around, everything was happening so fast, I was crying, [and] my husband was rushing to put on clothes to go down the house. People started rushing to the house and later I had to be taken to the hospital,” she said.