Sister: No closure until contract killer’s boss caught
Published:Saturday | December 7, 2019 | 12:00 AM
Tricia Chambers-Forrester, sister of slain former chairman of the Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC), Douglas Chambers, says she will never received full closure until the person who ordered her brother’s murder is caught.
Tesha Miller was on Tuesday found guilty of accessory before and after the fact to the 2008 murder of Chambers, which was described by a witness in the trial as a contract killing.
In September 2017, accused killer Andre Bryan was freed of the murder.
Miller was the reputed don of the Clansman Gang that unleashed a wave of extortion and murder throughout Spanish Town and other communities.
“Tesha Miller has been convicted, that is good. But as was disclosed in the court proceedings, Tesha was following a contract killing order.
“We will only have closure when the person who made the contract faces justice. This may not happen in my lifetime, or indeed ever, but I live by my faith that one day, maybe one day, the full truth will come out,” Chambers-Forrester said in an emailed response to The Gleaner.
Eleven years after the former JUTC chairman was shot to death, his sister said that the family is still grieving.
“We have never recovered from the traumatic event of his murder – it’s had a psychological impact on all of us – his widow, his kids, his siblings and our mum (now deceased recently) ... . Sadness, confusion, depression, helplessness, feeling of hopelessness that this case has dragged on for so long without closure,” she said.
SENSELESS
Chambers-Forrester, who described her brother’s murder as “senseless”, said that he was simply doing his job.
“All my brother was trying to do was to turn JUTC from a money-losing company to an efficient, profitable state company. His style may have ruffled a few feathers, but that’s barbarous that someone out there would be so bothered by his doing good things for his country that they would order his killing,” she said.
In the trial, the Crown’s witness, a self-proclaimed former member of the Spanish Town-based Clansman Gang, told the court that Miller had a meeting with him and other men a day before the killing where Miller told them to form a diversion.
Miller, however, denied knowing the witness and asserted that he was not involved in the killing.
The former JUTC chairman was gunned down outside the company’s depot in Spanish Town, St Catherine, on June 27, 2008.