Clarendon’s great tragedy - Children burnt to death in house fire

Micey Walters had hardly left her house when she was told that her house was engulfed in flames. Her two children, Kayla, four, and Abigail, three, were inside.

They would not make it out.

"God, a whey mi do? A feel like a gwine mad, a caan go on," she wept at the site of her family's one-bedroom house that was burnt to the ground with the children inside at Haylesfield, Clarendon, yesterday.

The mother had reportedly taken food to their father, Owen Tomlinson, who was working on a house in the community when the blaze started.

"Mi never gone fi more than five minutes," the tearful Walters said as neighbours and relatives consoled her on her return from the Lionel Town Hospital, where she had been taken for medical attention as she reeled from the shock of losing two of her three children so tragically.

"God, why You give me them and tek them back just so?," she wailed.

Deputy Superintendent Dennis Lyons of the Clarendon Division of the Jamaica Fire Brigade told THE WEEKEND STAR that his team responded to the fire around 11 a.m., but had not yet determined the cause of the fire.

Desmond McKenzie, minister of local government and rural development, in a statement yesterday, described the incident as 'a great tragedy".

"Abigail was just three years old and Kayla, four. I want to express my heartfelt condolences to all their relatives, friends and the community of Haylesfield," the minister said.

Tomlinson said that his children were his motivation for all his hard work.

"When mi work, mi try put dem school money one side 'cause mi never go school. All two, three day mi deh a sea a fight fi mi pickney dem," he said.

"Them nuh lef' me. Everywhere me a go, a me and dem - one pon mi back, one pon mi side; a so mi carry dem," he said as tears streamed down his face.