There is no Father’s Day this year for Lloyd Deen. Neither was there an Easter.
In fact, these days have been empty with no meaningful meal or sleep ever since his beloved daughter, Jasmine, vanished 116 days ago.
“I can’t have no Father’s Day,” the broken dad told The Sunday Gleaner last Thursday as tears welled up in his eyes. “The rest a pickney dem can say, ‘Happy Father’s Day’, but me nah feel like a father. I feel like me let down my youth, star.”
Deen, who has three daughters and a son, believes he has let down Jasmine, who vanished on her way from classes at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, on February 27.
“To how me a move, me shoulda find her already. I should have my youth here with me on Father’s Day. So I can’t celebrate Father’s Day. I don’t feel like a father,” added Deen, now wiping puddles of his tears from his eyelids.
“But I have to find my youth; it could take a hundred years,” he said, hanging on to hope that his visually impaired daughter is still alive – perhaps being held as a sex slave in a stinking, God-forsaken hell somewhere.
But “I don’t feel that she dead,” he stressed, carefully assembling a pair of Jasmine’s beloved shoes underneath her neatly made bed in Eleven Miles, Bull Bay, St Andrew. Except for an opened Bible placed on top of it, that bed, for the most part, has remained unused.
So, too, are Jasmine’s many books, which her dad painstakingly cleans the dust from on the most depressing days.
Although he is hoping for the best, the hurting dad knows his search may not lead to the outcome he desperately wants.
“If I even find a bone for her, I will satisfy, ‘cause right now, I expect anything, but I am telling you that I don’t feel that she is dead,” continued Deen.
Twenty-two-year-old Jasmine is the second of Deen’s children and the eldest girl. Their mother died of heart complications in 2008 and since then, Deen, a mason and painter, has dedicated his life to raising them on his own.
His 25-year-old son sleeps in a separate room, while the three girls would sleep together in the back, he said, before re-enacting how he would usher Jasmine and the other girls to a nearby corner and tell them to cover their ears as warring gunmen traded bullets outside in the war-torn community on some nights.
Jasmine was always a bright child with a winning smile, he said. Despite her mother’s death, she performed excellently in school and secured 14 Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate subjects at Meadowbrook High, earning her a place to read for her degree in The UWI’s Faculty of Law.
At every level of her schooling, Deen said he paid for boarding expenses to ensure Jasmine would not have to travel back and forth. But first-year living expenses on the Rex Nettleford Hall on campus proved difficult after three months, he said. So the decision was made for her to commute.
Deen disappeared in February, after reportedly boarding a taxi at the Irvine Hall gate of the St Andrew-based university some time before 10 p.m. She was wearing a white blouse and blue jeans, and sleuths retraced her movements and have even spoken to the taxi driver and other potential witnesses.
Two months later, the cops arrested 40-year-old Tamar Henry, also of Bull Bay, and 36-year-old Gregory Wright, after they were found in possession of Deen’s belongings. Both have subsequently been charged possession of identity information, unauthorised access to computer data and simple larceny.
This is not enough, said Deen, questioning why, even with the men in custody, the cops have failed to secure meaningful information about his daughter’s whereabouts.
“It’s like people don’t understand; the longer we wait is the farther she is going to go and the harder it is going to be to find her, “ he said, disheartened that the COVID-19 outbreak thwarted his efforts to search for Jasmine himself.
Last Friday, Assistant Commissioner of Police Fitz Bailey, whose office has taken over the investigation, stuck to the familiar tune when pressed about the police’s failure so far to locate the missing girl.
“The bottom line is that we have not been able to find a body. We don’t know what happened to her,” he told The Sunday Gleaner. “We have to operate within the frame of the law; the men are in custody. They gave us a story. Everybody has an alibi, we have to prove or disprove that alibi and we have exhausted a number of lines of inquiries, and the investigation is not dead. It is still active.”