St Thomas rocked by second weekend double murder

Hours after Saturday’s shooting death of 50-year-old Denise Bell in Seaforth, St Thomas, Rashelle Bennett was still in disbelief that her mother would never return home.

Although the 50-year-old businesswoman’s blood stained the road, Bennett was still walking around their partially constructed home in the hope that she would stumble on her mother and that the nightmare would be over.

Bell and her partner, Germaine Jeffrey, 41, were shot and killed around 10:25 p.m. Saturday.

“There are times when I say she soon come home. Last night, I heard a car reversing, and I said to myself, ‘A she come,’ and I got up and I cracked the window and it’s not her,” Bennett, the only child for Bell, told The Gleaner.

“I still don’t get it because when I got the call, I was told that ‘her partner’ was shot, so the first thing I wanted to do was try to call her, but the phone just a ring, a ring, a ring, a ring.”

It was the second double murder in St Thomas in consecutive days. National junior footballer Jedine Carr, 18, and taxi driver Andrew Mullings were gunned down Friday evening.

Bennett said that Jeffrey and Bell were attacked after her mother closed her shop, which she operates in Seaforth, and placed her grandniece in Jeffrey’s car.

The child was spared.

In the last conversation Bennett had with her mother in their bathroom on Saturday morning, they joked about Bennett’s hair brush, which Bell was using at the time.

“Never a dull day with her. If she’s going out, you have to video her. The better half of me is just gone. ... Not even get to squeeze her finger,” she said, ruing that she had missed her mother’s final moments alive.

Bennett said she sometimes cautioned her mother about closing her shop late at nights, saying, “Mommy, you no fraid?” But Bell sought to play down her fears and urged her not to worry.

Vinola Carr, Bell’s 68-year-old mother, is also said to be in denial that her only child has been murdered.

Patricia Carr Bonfield, an aunt of the deceased woman, was also reeling from shock.

“We are so broken. We are so broken,” were all the words the grief-stricken woman could find to tell The Gleaner during a visit to her house.

Jeffrey was overseas for a time and returned to Jamaica shortly before the coronavirus pandemic, which swept ashore here in March 2020. He spent the last three years working on a construction project nearby. Some of the material he purchased was still lying in the yard shared by Bell and Bennett.

A motive for the murder has not been officially determined, but a police officer who spoke to The Gleaner anonymously said that gang violence is on the rise in Seaforth.