THE EDITOR, Sir:
AT THE time of writing this piece, my good friend is mourning the loss of her pregnant daughter and identical twin daughters to men armed with high-powered weapons. She bore those twins at age 36. It was a late pregnancy which left her ill and unable to again conceive as a consequence of medical negligence following the birth of the twins. She was depressed after their birth having to live with the fact that this was to be her last pregnancy. She, however, enjoyed and was comforted with God's gift of her beautiful identical twins. Her 15-year-old daughter fell out of school this year after becoming pregnant, her mother agonised her daughter's premature end to her high school career, however, fuelled by a mother's unending love, she kept her at home.
At 3:45 a.m., the armed bloodhounds kicked her door open, she was with her three children and a grandchild yet unborn. She ran out of the house, wrongly assuming that the terrorists' prey must have been grown men or at least adults. She was proven wrong when in her absence and without a chance to plead with the executioners, she heard the lethal sound of rifles as they opened fire on the two three-year-olds and the 15-year-old expectant mom/child. At KPH I am told, the baby who was partially delivered on arrival, could not be saved. The pregnancy was all of eight and one half months old.
She spoke to me from the crime scene in Rema nine hours later. It was a monologue, an experience resonant of the "weeping of Rachel", that biblical mother whose weeping is aptly described in the book of St. Matthew. It describes a mother's pain following the massacre ordered by Herod of all babies two years and under in his foiled attempt to murder the Messiah, Christ. St. Mathew Chapter 2 verse 18 describes Rachel's condition as is my friend's thus:
"In Rama (sic) was there a voice heard lamentation and weeping and great mourning Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not"
Two mornings earlier, six members of one family were destroyed in the quiet rural community of Rock Hall. We have hit an all-time low in the choice of victims to kill for the sake of revenge. In what way do you make a 68-year-old deacon suffer death for the deeds of his son? And how can a pair of three-year-olds pay for acts unknown to them? Tell me, how could the unborn be now added to the list of those who seek revenge?
I have tried to comfort my friend, but how can I share the pain of this woman for an experience I am incapable of knowing its magnitude? I am writing for therapy, as it were to get it out. No problem I have experienced in my own life can come close to her pain, this mother who in one act of savagery lost her three children awakened from their sleep into death!
I ask the question confounded, at a loss for answers, what did we do to be rewarded with all this? Can one country afford the cost of all this blood? Which Herod amongst us has ordered all of this? Somehow, I feel that these very questions were asked in this same country four hundred years ago.
To the murderous cowards in hiding I say to their consciences, if consciences they have, in the words of Marley who transformed his West Kingston poverty into preaching morality to the world : "someone will have to pay for all the innocent blood they shed every day, so the Bible say". Hush Sharon it tuff, but God naw sleep.
I am etc.,
BERT SAMUELS
Attorney at Law
33 Duke Street
