Trelawny farming district mourns 10-year-old Shani Coke after brutal killing

On Tuesday night in Tyre, Trelawny, Aston Coke remained fixed to the spot beside a dirt road as police worked the scene below. In the undergrowth rested the body of his 10-year-old daughter, Shani Coke — known at home as Kaidra — discovered partly undressed with her throat cut.

Ill and unable to leave, Coke spent hours staring at the emergency lights sweeping the dark, struggling to accept what had unfolded so close to home.

Shani, the second of his four girls, was cherished in the district and excelled at Troy Primary School. Neighbours remembered her as polite, bright, and well liked.

“My daughter was the nicest little girl you would have ever meet,” her weeping father said. “She was a sweet and caring little girl, and the entire neighbourhood loved her. Kaja was just the perfect child. She mash up her academics at Troy Primary School and she just did what she had to do.”

That evening she had been asked to fetch meat from a shop close by. A young cousin usually went with her for safety, but he had come off his bicycle earlier and was too hurt to join her. She set out alone and did not return.

Residents searched the area in panic until her body was found. Coke, confined to bed while fighting colon cancer, learned of the tragedy when Shani’s mother telephoned him in distress.

“When her mother told me, I told her that nothing couldn’t go suh,” he recalled. “I just start screaming same time. All now I can’t believe, and I just keep begging God to put back the life in my daughter. I just can’t believe that this reach at my doorstep.”

He last saw her on Saturday, dressed for a neighbourhood outing. She had hurried over, smiling, and told him: “Daddy, mi come look for you.” That was their final meeting while she was alive.

“She was very happy. I didn’t know it was the last time I was going to see my child. Is four daughters mi have, enuh... and people will tell you that I grow them like white fowl. They are always inside and taxi carry dem to and from school. Shani wasn’t living with me, but she was also grown inside. We don’t even send our children to other people yard to do homework or anything at all,” Coke said.

Grief has mixed with fury. Coke identified Delroy Coke as the main person of interest and said the man had only lately returned to the farming settlement. Investigators described him as a convicted sex offender who had already served prison time for sexual crimes.

“I told his father not to bring him back in the community because this boy is known to take set on children,” the angry father Coke revealed. “I run a little business and I see him come buy file and machete, and I told him mi nuh want him to go up there and molest mi daughter... He has been getting in trouble and molesting children for a while now, so that was why we didn’t want him back in the place.”

Once word of the child’s death spread through the close farming community, outrage turned to violence. A crowd hunted down the suspect and his father and cut them with machetes. Delroy Coke was killed; his father remains in hospital.