Grief still heavy as grave-digging begins for Clarendon family of five
Published:Thursday | July 21, 2022 | 12:10 AMPaul H. Williams/Gleaner Writer
Earl Smith stood among several emotional onlookers in the Sutton Memorial Cemetery in Clarendon on Tuesday as an excavator began digging a nine-by-20-foot grave to inter a Clarendon mother and her four children, who were killed last month.
Wearing a button emblazoned with the images of the deceased, Smith told The Gleaner that he was still numb, a month after the bodies of 31-year-old Kemesha Wright; Kimanda Smith, 15; Sharalee Smith, 12; Rafaella Smith, 5: and 23-month-old Kishawn Henry Jr were found with their throats slashed inside their Cocoa Piece home.
A builder by profession, Smith said that he had lined out the spot at the southeastern end of the cemetery to build the grave to accommodate the four coffins, pointing out that Wright will share a coffin with her youngest child.
Reflecting on the “terrible” tragedy, he was still pained that he lost all his three grandchildren at once.
“It is so terrible. Mi three grandpickney dead one time. Mi no love to remember,” he said, folding his lips as he lost the battle trying to hold back the tears. “A mi grow dem. Dem grow in a my hand until mi leave and go away two years ago. ... Mi keep contact all the while. Mi call dem, mi talk to dem, and everything until the day they die.”
With Wright’s 23-year-old cousin, Rushane Barnett, charged for the murders, Smith issued a word of caution: :”Know who yuh tek and put at yuh house before yuh even let them live there. Even if is your family, keep them away from the house.”
The pain of the loss was also still fresh for his brother, Oriel.
“I’m just having a hard time with this. I’m having a headache. Mi don’t feel good. Hard memories,” he said. “I don’t know how am gonna take it on funeral day when they going dung. It’s gonna be a hard time right there. It kind a hard to look up there right now because when you look at it yuh know is all five of them going right there so, it don’t pretty at all.”
As she prepared corned beef sandwiches and listened to her brothers, Angella chimed in to say she, too, could not believe they were all dead.
“It is very hard to cope with knowing that my nephew is not here at this present moment, and knowing what he’s going through. I know it’s not very easy for him,” she said of Smith’s son, the father of Wright’s first three children.
Goosebumps covered her at the thought of funeral day as she sighed, shook and clasped her hands.
Oneil, another brother, was equally distraught.
“... A shocking thing right now. Mi not okay. Sometime when mi lie dung, look like a dem mi a see, believe mi, so even at the funeral mi no know how mi a go manage,” he said with a shaky voice.
Cemetery-keeper Trevor Ricketts said it was certainly the biggest grave built under his stewardship and he was anticipating a massive turnout for Wednesday’s tomb-building and an even greater number of mourners at the funeral as the gruesome incident rattled the entire community and the wider nation.