Woman rescued from blaze as homes torched in gang war

Lawrence Smith relocated from Guyana 20 years ago and settled in the Williams Lane area of Spanish Town, St Catherine.

Over that time, he watched the community disintegrate into gang conflicts. However, he did everything to keep his wife, four children, and his wife’s 72-year-old mother safe from the spiralling violence.

But Smith could not escape the clutches of crime early Thursday morning as he lost half of his four-bedroom house and grocery shop to fire.

Feuding gangs firebombed a house within proximity of his two-storey house, and the flames quickly spread, wiping out much of his possessions.

“Mi hear dem shout ‘Fire!’ and mi tun idiot, nuh know what to do. The only thing we could do is run out of the house and leave everything,” Smith told The Gleaner.

“Mi wife’s mother was trapped upstairs and we had to use a ladder to climb up and rescue her,” he said, adding that she could hardly breathe because of smoke inhalation and has since been hospitalised.

With his face a canvas of distress, Smith disclosed that it will be difficult for himself and his family to recover. Hardly anything was saved.

“What no burn, get water damage. Laptops and computers for my daughter who is in college, plus her books and other things that have to do with her college work, all gone,” Smith lamented.

“WI clothes and furniture and appliances, the things dem in the shop that take care of mi family destroyed, but mi give thanks that we are alive,” he said.

Neighbours theorised that Smith’s house was not the intended target of the arson attack but became collateral damage because of its proximity to a three-bedroom board house occupied by a member of a rival faction.

It is theorised that residents have become enmeshed in a reprisal that stemmed from the ongoing conflict that started at 31 St John’s Road and spilled over into bordering Williams Lane.

And, while the Williams Lane fire was being extinguished by firefighters, another house at the top of 31 St John’s Road had also been set ablaze.

Seventy-eight-year-old Evadney Forbes, who suffers from heart problems, was alone at home when she saw smoke coming from a back room of her five-bedroom concrete house that morning.

Hours after she retired to bed, she was assisted by her daughter, who lived nearby, to fight the fire before the brigade responded.

Forbes said that the fire was preceded by a barrage of gunshots fired close to her house.

“I was doing online service when mi hear a whole heap of gunshot, and mi just grab up the phone and the Bible and run inside and took a heart pill, because mi feel nervous,,” she told The Gleaner.

“I don’t consider myself safe living here, mi a left the house and tek way myself because me can’t carry the house,” she said.

Forbes’ losses were confined mainly to a bed and clothing.

Superintendent Garnett Douse of the St Catherine Fire Department has estimated the Williams Lane fire damage at $15 million, and that at 31 St John’s Road at $400,000.

“We are not able to say what caused both fires, because nobody wants to talk how it started,” said Douse, referring to the 2:41 call for 19 Williams Lane. Two units from Spanish Town responded and were able to save 50 per cent of the structure,” the superintendent added.

He revealed that, while they were battling that fire, another call about the St John’s Road fire came in at 3:35 a.m.

One unit from the Portmore Fire Station was deployed.

Major General Antony Anderson, Jamaica’s police commissioner, is concerned about ongoing gang conflicts that continue to rock the St Catherine North Police Division.

Anderson joined Assistant Commissioner Gary Griffiths and divisional commander Superintendent Howard Chambers in Thursday’s tour of Railway Lane where they visited relatives of four men who were murdered in a drive-by Sunday night.

The community remains tense.

“We are seeing a series of reprisals in which mothers, cousins, and friends of gangsters have been killed, and it goes back and forth.” Anderson told reporters Thursday.

“We have been intercepting them. We are on them. The intel is coming in and the community is supporting our efforts.”

The police commissioner also visited 31 St John’s Road on Thursday.

Approximately 76 per cent of murders are gang-related.