Shineka Gray’s family left in misery

WESTERN BUREAU:

“I’VE NEVER wished death on anyone until I met Gregory. You honestly make me feel sick to my stomach. You have shown no remorse for slaughtering my niece like an animal.”

That was the grim admission made by Nickeda Gray in her victim impact statement as she outlined the effect of Gregory Roberts’ 2017 murder of her niece, Shineka Gray, as the statement was read out loud by the court registrar in the St James Circuit Court on Thursday.

The statement was read during the hearing to determine an appropriate sentence for Roberts’ role in killing 15-year-old Gray. A seven-member jury found him guilty of the teen’s murder on January 24 this year.

Dumped ‘like garbage’

The pain and trauma of Nickeda Gray and her family members could be felt from the two-page document she had previously written and signed. It was read in the presence of Roberts and his attorney, Chumu Parris, presiding High Court Justice Bertram Morrison, and trial prosecutor Andrea Martin-Swaby, who joined the proceedings via Zoom.

“After three agonising days of searching, one phone call confirmed that my niece’s body was found in the worst state of decomposition, stabbed viciously 19 times, slaughtered like an animal with a kitchen knife by Gregory Roberts. She was violently raped as well and dumped into bushes like a nobody and like garbage, all for his selfish delusional obsession over a measly $10,000 he could not possibly afford to lose. His unwillingness to take rejection from a woman caused him to take out his anger on my brother’s child, a random child,” Gray said in the statement.

Those comments were in reference to testimony during Roberts’ trial in which the court was shown text messages sent by the defendant to his ex-girlfriend concerning money she allegedly owed him.

The prosecution led evidence that Roberts’ anger about the money and a desire to intimidate the ex-girlfriend served as the motive for Shineka Gray’s killing.

“Gregory’s actions have cause such misery and disruption to my extended family’s households, which we strive to maintain. Since Shineka was forced from our lives, we have struggled to function sanely each day,” Nickeda Gray’s statement went on. “I have been unable to sleep since February 1, 2017, when we had to identify her body. I am no longer able to trust people like I did before. I struggle with anxiety attacks, and there are times when I get to a truly deep, dark place called depression.”

Children traumatised

Gray went further, describing how the family’s children have been traumatised since Shineka, a grade-10 student of Green Pond High School in St James, disappeared on January 29, 2017, while returning home from a schoolmate’s funeral, only to be found dead in bushes in the Irwin community on February 1 that year.

“Because of your crime, my other niece, now 15, is afraid to traverse the streets of Montego Bay. She is even afraid to attire herself like a girl, for she does not want to present herself as a target for monsters like you. My children are afraid of public transportation, and I no longer use taxis for my kids,” said Gray.

Meanwhile, Parris sought to persuade the court to consider a starting point of 20 to 25 years for Roberts’ sentence as opposed to going the route of life imprisonment.

“Rehabilitation is one of the principles of sentencing, and to seek the death penalty, somebody is incapable of reform, and the court has to be satisfied that that person is incapable of reform. This man, even when found guilty, is capable of some reform, and it is a question of how your lordship deals with that … there is sufficient basis to find that, though this is a horrible murder, it is not the worst of the worst,” Parris said in his closing submissions.

The sentencing hearing is set to resume this morning when the prosecution will deliver its closing submissions ahead of Morrison handing down sentence on Roberts.

christopher.thomas@gleanerjm.com