IN JAMAICA: Where's My Baby? Family's Search Continues Days After 3-Y-O, Samunya Bloomfield Vanishes....After falling asleep at 11 p.m., Yanisha awoke around midnight to use the bathroom and noticed her elder daughter, whom she affectionately called 'Poochy', was gone, along with her cell phone.

Martin Baxter, Gleaner Writer Published: Wednesday | June 25, 2014

The pattering of little footsteps, a child's laughter, singing, and occasional crying - all sounds that breathed life into the green board house in Grove Farm, St Catherine - have been replaced by a deafening silence.

Samunya Bloomfield

The quietness occupying Yanisha Brown's two-bedroom home in Old Harbour was yesterday mixed with a solemn disposition that its occupants have been forced to wear since the household's firstborn, three-year-old Samunya Bloomfield, vanished without a trace minutes before midnight last Friday.

On arrival at the cosy yard with two houses standing beside each other,The Gleaner was told the distraught mother of two would soon be out. Almost bedridden by the tragedy that has befallen her small family unit of four, the slow-moving 22-year-old stepped out on to the veranda in a vibrant multicoloured dress that contradicted her mood.

She cut a broken figure as she tried to compose herself and conjure the strength to recount how her family came to be missing its life and soul.

"My babies were on the bed sleeping, both of them. I have a bath and I get out of the bathroom and I still have to pass them, and I stop on the way and I fix them on the bed," she explained, her voice cracking with exhaustion and raw emotion.

After falling asleep at 11 p.m., Yanisha awoke around midnight to use the bathroom and noticed her elder daughter, whom she affectionately called 'Poochy', was gone, along with her cell phone.

NOWHERE TO BE FOUND

"I went to see if I could use the bathroom and come back, and when I enter the room, I didn't see Poochy on the bed, so I turn back inside my room because normally, if she gets up in the night, that's where she would come and curl up in the middle, or she would wake us up. I start calling and I start to look for her when I really saw that she wasn't in the house. I went to the front door, and when I opened it, the lock flied. The door was still closed."

Kris-Nieve Bloomfield (forefront),
father of three-year-old Samunya

Yanisha's common-law husband, 28-year-old Kris-Nieve Bloomfield, was out of the house at the time, but he rushed back home on hearing that his daughter, who will celebrate her fourth birthday on July 2, was missing and called the police.

"That question bubbling over and over in me: 'Why?'" he mumbled toThe Gleaner.

"Not even words can explain. Mi can't even find the words still. Mi nah tek any odda option. Dem gwine find mi daughter."

Neighbour and sister of the missing girl's father, Tashana Henry, was left distressed and despondent about the disappearance of Poochy, who often played with her youngest child, two-year-old Amari. more