A mother’s regret

Eunice Chambers’ only child, Khanice Jackson, had something she wanted them to discuss over lunch on March 24, 2021.

But Chambers pushed back their lunch date to the next day because of work.

That was the last time she would speak to her daughter, Chambers recounted on Thursday in a riveting victim impact statement read in the Home Circuit Court during the sentencing hearing for confessed killer Robert Fowler.

Jackson was strangled to death on the morning of March 24, 2021, by Fowler on the back seat of his car along Passagefort Drive in Portmore, St Catherine, he admitted in a caution statement to police investigators.

“He drew the deceased over on to the back seat of the car and strangled her until he saw froth coming from her mouth and that she had stopped moving,” said lead prosecutor Jeremy Taylor, citing the caution statement.

An examination by a medical doctor revealed that Fowler had scratch marks at the back of his shoulders, said Taylor.

Fowler pleaded guilty to the murder on March 8 this year. His sentencing hearing was adjourned until next week Thursday when presiding judge Justice Leighton Pusey will impose a sentence.

Chambers has been ruing her decision to brush off the lunch date with her only child.

“Not seeing her that day cause me to feel guilty,” she said, according to her niece, Neva Chambers, who penned the statement.

Jackson, a 20-year-old accounting clerk, and Fowler, a 50 year-old mechanic at the time, had forged a friendship a year earlier because of an act of kindness he displayed, according to details disclosed in court by prosecutors.

They both lived in Portmore and worked with different employers in Cross Roads, St Andrew, and met on a public passenger vehicle in 2020.

After that, prosecutors say that Fowler began using his motor car to pick up Jackson at a bus stop in Portmore and take her to work.

“Eventually, this became the norm,” said Taylor.

“He would sometimes even wait [for] her at the bus stop when he was passing and she had not yet arrived. And for all intents and purposes, it seemed that it was a courtesy that he was extending to Miss Jackson.”

The prosecutor said that on the day of the killing, Fowler picked up Jackson along Passagefort Drive en route to Cross Roads.

During the trip, he said a “disagreement” developed between them over what Fowler acknowledged was a promise he made three weeks earlier to give the young woman money to buy a gift for her boyfriend.

“He expressed that the deceased knew that he was under pressure at work and that things were hard for him,” Taylor said, citing Fowler’s caution statement.

As the “disagreement” continued, the prosecutor said Fowler turned around the vehicle on Passagefort Drive and told Jackson she should take a bus because he had no money to pay the toll.

He parked the vehicle and went over to the back seat, where he strangled Jackson, Taylor said.

The St Catherine man then drove the vehicle with Jackson’s body to the Forum Fishing Village, where he bound the hands and feet before leaving it in an abandoned building.

Later that evening, he went back for the body and took it to Dyke Road, where he abandoned it in a ditch. It was found two days later in a state of decomposition.

A post-mortem listed the cause of death as neck compression and found “signs of blunt impact trauma” to Jackson’s body.

Fowler was taken into custody the same day the body was found after Chambers alerted the police that he was a possible suspect.

Chambers, who now resides in the United States, says she “despise” Fowler and does not want to see him in court “or hear anything from him”.

She said that she has not visited her daughter’s grave because she has “nightmares due to the graphic state and decomposition her body was found in”.

Taylor, in his submissions before Justice Pusey, recommended that, along with the mandatory life sentence, Fowler be ordered to serve 20 years in prison before he is eligible for parole.

Taylor urged the court to take note of the violent homicide rate in Jamaica and pointed to the confessed killer’s attempts to conceal the crime by twice moving Jackson’s body and dumping her personal belongings at the Cross Roads Market in St Andrew.

But Fowler’s attorney, Linden Wellesley, in his submissions, urged Justice Pusey to “temper justice with mercy”.

“We are like mendicants before you. I use the word mendicants because Mr Fowler has not wasted the court’s time,” he said, referring to the discount given to convicts who enter a guilty plea early in their case.

livern.barrett@gleanerjm.com