Top 5 Most Memorable Killings in Jamaica
Jamaica is well known for its high homicide rate. As a result, the tiny island spanning 10,900 square kilometres in area, has made several top murderous countries list.
According to sociologists, this is due to a lack of resources, poverty, drugs, and guns, all of which have created a culture of violence. Jamaica had the second-highest murder rate in the world in 2022, with 43.85 homicides per 100,000 people.
Today we will look at the top five memorable killings to have taken place over the past 100 years in Jamaica. This list was curated by yardhype.com.
5 – Clarendon Cocoa Piece Massacre
In what can only be described as a senseless and heartless act, confessed killer Rushane Barnett pleaded guilty in July of 2022 for the gruesome killing of five of his family members, which included four children, Kishawn Henry, five-year-old Rafaella Smith, 10-year-old Shara-Lee Smith, 15-year-old Kimanda Smith and their mother, Kishawn Henry 34.
According to police reports, Barnett committed the murders on the night of June 20 and in the early morning of the following day, June 2021. All the victims had stab wounds and throats slashed.
4 – Breaton Killings
According to reports on March 14, 2001, police cornered seven suspected gunmen in a building in Portmore, St. Catherine, in the community of Braeton Phase 3. All of the men were killed in an alleged gun battle, as per the police report. However, Claude Mills gave a different account of what went on that deadly night.
Mills, a reporter at the time, says he heard the now deceased men pleading and crying for their lives, then shortly after hearing loud explosions causing car alarms to go off. The police involved in the killings were a part of the Reneto Adams-led Crime Management Unit. Who assured the Jamaican public that justice was served.
3 – Ananda Dean’s murder
A story that rocked the nation to its core in which eight-year-old Ananda Dean was raped and murdered, she went missing on September 17, 2008, as she left school. The crime shocked the nation and sparked national debates about children’s safety in Jamaica.
Ananda’s death sparked a movement to raise awareness of child safety and justice, with the Ananda Alert named in her memory issued each time a child is reported missing. Despite decades of investigation, the case has not been solved.
2 – Coral Garden\ Bad Friday Massacre
Coral Gardens Massacre relates to a series of events that took place in Jamaica on Good Friday, 1963. The Jamaican police and military forces detained many Rastafarians throughout Jamaica following violent clashes at a gas station in Montego Bay, killing and torturing several of them.
Rastafarians Rudolph Franklin, Lloyd Waldron, Noel Bowen, two policemen Corporal Clifford Melbourne and Inspector Bertie Scott, and three civilians were all killed in the aftermath of the clash.
1 – The Tivoli Incursion
It was reported that around 70 civilians and three security force members were killed in the battle, which was unlike anything in Jamaica’s history between security forces and gunmen in Tivoli Garden.
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The deadly events took place after JLP leader Bruce Golding signed an extradition request issued by the US for drug kingpin Christopher Dudus Coke.
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