‘Mommy, they going to kill me!’
Speaking through tears, Marjorie Williams, mother of 17-year-old Fernando Grant and 20-year-old Fabian Grant, testifies at the West Kingston Commission of Enquiry about how her two sons were ordered from her Dee Cee Avenue home by a Jamaica Defence Force soldier and killed by policemen.
MARJORIE WILLIAMS held on to one of her daughters and wept yesterday as she recounted hearing her teenage son cry out for her twice to indicate that his brother had been shot to death and that he was about to meet the same fate.
Williams was testifying before the West Kingston Commission of Enquiry about the deaths of her two sons, 17-year-old Fernando Grant and 20-year-old Fabian Grant, during the May 2010 police-military operation in the west Kingston community of Tivoli Gardens.
She recounted that her sons – who she described as very quiet and respectful – were ordered out of her Dee Cee Avenue home by a Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) soldier who instructed a group of policemen standing outside to “sort them out”.
She said after being made to kneel on the sidewalk for several minutes, the brothers were taken to a neighbour’s house, where they were told to lie in a flower garden.
Speaking through tears, the woman said she and one of her neighbours were ordered back into their homes and that’s when she peeped through a window and saw masked policemen standing over her weeping sons.
“Both a dem were crying and t he policeman say ‘Shut up, boy! You going dead today’,” Williams recalled.
With the tears now rolling down her cheeks, Williams said she left the window to report to her blind father what she had seen, but she soon broke down on the witness stand, forcing a break in the hearings.
HER SON’S CRY
On the resumption, Williams said while speaking to her father, she heard a loud explosion.
“An’ ah hear Fernando say, ‘Mommy! Mommy! Dem kill ‘Pucksy’!” she recalled, making reference to her eldest son’s nickname.
“Then ah heard him say ‘Mommy! Mommy! Dem going to kill me’! and then I heard the shots go off,” Williams testified.
“When I heard the shots and didn’t hear Fernando again I went upstairs and peep through the window. There was a white police truck parked on the road and I saw when the police and another guy put the body (Fabian) in the truck,” she continued.
The long-time Tivoli Gardens resident said she and other members of her family who were inside the house began “crying out for help because they (the police) killed my two sons execution-style”.
Moments later, she said a group of policemen came inside the house and “they were very, very angry”.
“Deh ask wi for the phones and ask if wi mek any calls. Then one a dem seh, ‘Shut up! Unnu a go dead today!’,” she recounted.
But responding to questions from attorney for the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) Valerie Neita-Robertson during crossexamination, Williams acknowledged that much of what she said during her testimony was very important but was never included in two witness statements she provided.
As an example, she conceded that the two statements – dated June 15 and August 16, 2010 – made no mention of Fernando’s last words to her or that the policemen were wearing masks, or that they told them they were going to die.
“‘Mommy! Mommy! Dem a go kill Pucksy!’ that was important?” Neita-Robertson questioned. “Yes ma’am,” Williams replied. “But you didn’t have it in your statement?” the JCF attorney continued.
“No, it wasn’t in the statement,” the woman acknowledged.
But Williams insisted that she was being truthful.