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Mark Wignall
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Would you partake in mob killing?
It happened at the beginning of last week and it has shaken me up so much that I am rethinking my views on vigilante justice.
A young school girl, not yet 12, from a district in the Red Hills area, goes missing last Monday. All involved go in search of her. Among those desperately trying to find her is a taxi driver who plies the route between Chancery Street and Padmore. He accompanies relatives to the police station to report the child missing.
That same evening, in a mix of the worst of horror movies and miracles, a tragedy unfolds. That same taxi driver turns out to be a beast of the worst sort. Earlier he had picked up the girl from Half-Way-Tree, driven the long way up into the bushes by Smokey Vale, stopped the car, manhandled the child then brutally raped and did other unspeakable things to her.
After he was finished, he bashed her head in, dug a grave and buried her, thinking she was dead. While he was pretending to look for her, the girl, who survived, dug her way out of the shallow grave and ran naked onto the nearby roadway where she was rescued by a passerby.
At the hospital the early hope is that she will be able to retain sight in the eye on the side of her head the monster bashed in. She told them what happened and later the police arrested the man.
I have never been a supporter of mob violence, but even the father of the monster said, "If mi si dem a kill him, mi wi tun wey mi head."
Jamaican businessman Doug Halsall, CEO of Advanced Integrated Systems, wrote recently that it was his hope one day that in Jamaica, "...crime will soon be tamed to be more that of passion, rather than those born of anger, depravity and deviance".
What makes this crime so depraved and the wider Jamaican community so scared is that the taxi driver involved was 'just another man' trying to earn a bread by working like the rest of us. The question is, if his mind could conjure up such a sick, depraved idea and he could bring it to reality, what does that say about the rest of us who are ready to make the claim that we are normal and not prone to such extreme and deviant behaviour?
Were it my daughter involved, that police station could not hold such a monster
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Would you partake in mob killing?
It happened at the beginning of last week and it has shaken me up so much that I am rethinking my views on vigilante justice.
A young school girl, not yet 12, from a district in the Red Hills area, goes missing last Monday. All involved go in search of her. Among those desperately trying to find her is a taxi driver who plies the route between Chancery Street and Padmore. He accompanies relatives to the police station to report the child missing.
That same evening, in a mix of the worst of horror movies and miracles, a tragedy unfolds. That same taxi driver turns out to be a beast of the worst sort. Earlier he had picked up the girl from Half-Way-Tree, driven the long way up into the bushes by Smokey Vale, stopped the car, manhandled the child then brutally raped and did other unspeakable things to her.
After he was finished, he bashed her head in, dug a grave and buried her, thinking she was dead. While he was pretending to look for her, the girl, who survived, dug her way out of the shallow grave and ran naked onto the nearby roadway where she was rescued by a passerby.
At the hospital the early hope is that she will be able to retain sight in the eye on the side of her head the monster bashed in. She told them what happened and later the police arrested the man.
I have never been a supporter of mob violence, but even the father of the monster said, "If mi si dem a kill him, mi wi tun wey mi head."
Jamaican businessman Doug Halsall, CEO of Advanced Integrated Systems, wrote recently that it was his hope one day that in Jamaica, "...crime will soon be tamed to be more that of passion, rather than those born of anger, depravity and deviance".
What makes this crime so depraved and the wider Jamaican community so scared is that the taxi driver involved was 'just another man' trying to earn a bread by working like the rest of us. The question is, if his mind could conjure up such a sick, depraved idea and he could bring it to reality, what does that say about the rest of us who are ready to make the claim that we are normal and not prone to such extreme and deviant behaviour?
Were it my daughter involved, that police station could not hold such a monster
(as if being raped isn't enough already! 
).....
- the death sentence.
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