Junior Kennedy, 7 years old and Davar Brown, 1 year and 7 months old. THEY WERE doing what children do -- playing with their toys on a quiet Sunday afternoon.
But yesterday that proved deadly for seven-year-old Junior Kennedy and Davar Brown, one year and seven months old, who died when huge chunks of a crumbling brick wall crushed their heads.
The boys were playing inside a tenement yard, which also houses Success Basic School, at 63 Wildman Street in Central Kingston. The boys were sitting on the bench under a tree playing with the toys they got at a treat on Saturday.
"Weh Junior, weh Junior, weh Junior. Jesus, Jesus, weh Junior deh, weh Junior deh, weh Junior deh," shrieked his mother, Nora Kennedy. Saturated with grief, she sat in the yard with a handkerchief around her head and a towel around her waist. Two elderly women provided solace while she hollered for her son.
In a moment of calm, she explained that she was cleaning her house and had just finished speaking to her son when she heard someone saying the wall had fallen on him. She said she ran to where he was. It took several minutes before they could remove him. His head was bashed in.
"Junior neva rude, jus him T.V," she said of the grade two student who attended the nearby Calabar Infant Primary and Junior High School.
"Me go ah school and ask dem (teachers) how him ah behave an dem seh him nice."
At the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH) where the boys were taken, Davar's mother, Patricia Hall, 23, was barefooted and incoherent, for the most part. Her T-shirt was stained with blood, the mark of her struggle to keep her son alive.
She said she heard the wall fall a little after 4:00 o'clock and saw her son under the brick chunks when she went to investigate.
Residents of Wildman Street and nearby communities who rushed to the scene stared in disbelief at the bloodstained bench and the rubble.
"Him (Davar) jus' feel like you lif' up a cat an every limb inna de cat soft," said Dawn Bailey, a 31-year-old woman who helped to pull out the boys.
She said she and a number of others struggled unsuccessfully for five minutes to remove Davar's tangled body from beneath the heavy rubble. They could have lived, she said, if more people had been there to help.
"When me teck Junior from under de block, him head sink inna de dirt," she said, tears rolling down her cheeks.
