TRAGIC MOM: I WAS BLESSED
Mourners gather in Queens to bid sad farewell to young model
and many of her friends.”
Desiree had arrived in Jamaica Oct. 20. The young woman, known as Desi to family and friends, was staying at a local hotel owned by her grandmother.
“She was an adventurous girl,” said Cali-Gibbon. “She traveled the world. She wanted to learn something about every religion, every culture. She didn’t want to go to the touristy areas of anywhere she went.
“She wanted to go to the heart of the country and see what it was really like.”
Her bruised and bloodied body was discovered about 4 miles outside the tourist town of Montego Bay, with her cell phone and one sandal missing.
Her parents flew down to identify the corpse and make a pilgrimage to the remote stretch where their child’s body was discovered.
The casket holding Desiree was covered in a white shroud with a purple cross as her parents stood together inside the church. Seven pallbearers carried her down the aisle for the sad ceremony.
The Rev. Chris Bethge recalled Desiree’s Baptism on April 29, 1995, inside “the church she loved so very much.” He addressed the slain girl’s parents directly during his homily.
“Desiree’s life, all too short, today has come full circle,” he said. “When she was born into this world, she came in tears while everyone in that room was rejoicing.
“My brothers and sisters, today we surround Desiree in tears. But we know she is rejoicing, rejoicing in the experience of this community who loves her so much.”
Bethge made a passing reference to the killer: “Today, we are reminded of the presence of evil.”
At the funeral’s end, the notes of “Amazing Grace” echoed through the teary crowd of 150 mourners.
The slain girl’s parents stopped as they exited the hourlong service to embrace some of the mourners. Her mother clutched a crucifix in her right hand, and gently placed her left hand on the casket.
Desiree’s body was then taken to an East Elmhurst crematorium, and Cali-Gibbon was already dreading the rest of the day — if not her life.
“I don’t know where to go from here,” she confessed to the church crowd.
“I don’t know how to live . . . . It will be a long haul. I need everybody to help me.”
A STOIC ANDREA Cali-Gibbon, looking down on her murdered daughter’s closed casket, spoke tenderly of the aspiring model’s vibrant life rather than her brutal death.
The mourning mom at first struggled for words Saturday as tears flowed freely inside the familiar Queens church where Desiree Gibbon was baptized and received her First Communion.
“I’ve realized that I was extremely blessed to be her mother,” said Cali-Gibbon, who took 30 seconds to compose herself before speaking. “I’ve realized she didn’t belong only to me, or my husband, or her sisters. “She belongs to everybody.” The 26-year-old victim’s blood-soaked body was discovered in the heavy brush adjoining an overgrown local roadway on Nov. 26 in St. James Parish on the island of Jamaica.
She was on the island trying to earn enough money to pay for film school in Europe, and died just four days before her scheduled return to Queens.
“She was searching for her own fame and fortune,” said her mom at the service held two days before Christmas. “She didn’t know she already had it.”
Cali-Gibbon and her husband, Gairy, both dressed in black, walked side-by-side about 10 feet behind the casket as they arrived on a rainy morning at the Incarnation Catholic Church in Queens Village.
The victim’s third-grade teacher, Judy Brennan, read a passage from Scriptures before the congregation joined in the singing of the hymn, “Here I Am, Lord.”
Cali-Gibbon delivered a powerful remembrance of her slain child inside a church filled with family, friends and a deep sense of loss.
“Desiree lived life,” her mother declared. “She loved life. She loved people . . . . I have to admit, she’s a better person than me.
“She had a very forgiving heart. She could forgive and forget.”
Though police in Jamaica told the Gibbons there was a person of interest in the slaying, no arrests have yet been made in the unexplained killing.
Cali-Gibbon answered a question posed by many over the last mournful month: No, she did not regret letting Desiree travel to Jamaica.
“She wanted to be there,” the mother said. “She was Jamaican. She had been there many times. Maybe seven or eight times . . . with her siblings