BY DONNA HUSSEY-WHYTE Sunday Observer staff reporter husseyd@jamaicaobserver.com Sunday, September 14, 2014
WHEN a mother loses a child due to illness, that feeling is unbearable. When she has lost that child at the hands of her own lover, the agony lasts forever and she is tormented by years of guilt and depression, as 47-year-old Jacqueline Rochester has learnt.
Rochester's story is a nightmare that any mother could experience.
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| A distraught Jacqueline Rochester still seeks justice after her baby was brutally killed following a horrific beating. |
"On the ninth of July 2005, my daughter was brutally murdered by someone I used to date. She was one year and six months old," she recalled.
Rochester had four children, two of whom were living with her at the time. She said that she left her two children, eight years old and one-and-a-half years old at the time with her lover, to attend her daughter's graduation with the intention of returning the following morning. However, threats of a hurricane prevented her from returning until a day later.
"My daughter had just passed her GSAT," Rochester recalled recently. "So I left the baby with him, then I got a call the following morning that my daughter was dead. When I came home she was in the morgue."
Rochester, who was living in Nain, St Elizabeth at the time, went to the Mandeville Police Station and was told that the baby could have been murdered. Her lover told her and the police that the baby fell off the bed and that a bicycle had fallen on her.
"But the police told me that they visited the house and looked at the bicycle and that could not have killed her," she said. "When the autopsy was done, it showed that she was beaten, her ribs were broken, inside of her was ruptured, her brain was swollen and there was a mark around her mouth to show that he was covering up her mouth," she told the Jamaica Observer.
She explained that the two weeks before an autopsy was performed her partner was still with her, but she could not shake the feeling that he was hiding something.
"He was there with me but there was this feeling inside of me, and I kept asking him 'You sure is not you kill my daughter? and he would say no," she stated.
But the day the autopsy was to be performed her lover left and she never saw or heard from him again.
"He left the day of the autopsy and never got the official autopsy report," Rochester said. "Him never pack him stuff or anything. I saw him when I was on the road walking towards the house and I asked where he was going and he said he was going to look for his friend in Mandeville, so I said, 'But when the autopsy result come out I'm going to be alone'. He said no, him soon come back. From that day until now I haven't seen or heard from him. That same day when they did the autopsy the policeman called me and said he murdered the baby because he was the only one with her at that time.
"I don't think he is dead," the broken-hearted mother said. "I don't have a clue where he is, but I am still trying to find out," she went on.
But Rochester said despite the fact that he was the only one who had access to her child at the time, no arrest was made. more
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