Pain lingers in Catadupa after 6-y-o drowns

A gloomy spectre hangs over the community of Catadupa, St James, roughly one week after the tragic drowning of six-year-old Jevanie Kidd.

Little Jevanie's mother, Georgia Adams, recalled a heavy conversation with her son, which took place the day before he was washed away by floodwaters on September 8. The boy died while trying to cross a ford on his community as he made his way from from the nearby Catadupa Primary and Infant School.

"On that last day I was on my day-off at home, and I went to Anchovy High School in the morning for orientation for my big daughter. When I went, I told my sister to remember to pick up juice at the shop for Jevanie, and when Jevanie came home later, he was on the bed with me. I told him to turn down his tablet, and he said, 'I don't like when you're not here, because I feel like I would kill myself'," Adams recalled.

"I drew him a little closer and catch my 'fraid', and I said to him, 'Stop it! Stop it! I don't want to hear you say so.' Then he came and lay down beside me and hugged me up," Adams, who is also a mother of three daughters, added.

"I feel it to my heart because I always say is my one pickney, since him is the littler one, so I pay more attention to him more than anyone else. I always try to protect him. If I am at work, I call and ask if he went to school," Adams added.

Shopkeeper Annakaye Wallace, who operates her business a few metres away from the school's front gate, recalled her last encounter with Jevanie.

"I saw the little boy right there so, and I said 'little boy, come out of the rain,' and I held him gently by the hand," Wallace said.

"He dropped his bag on the chair, then after that, I saw him get up and he took up his bag. I said, 'You nuh see the rain a fall hard? Come in, mi nah stop you from come in and sit down.' After I said that to him, him take up him bag and shot off," Wallace added.

the last time

Sadly, that would be the last anyone saw of the grade one student, as his body was found hours later in a section of the Catadupa river following a search by relatives and community members.

Reflecting further on her son, Adams described Jevanie as a child who got along splendidly with older people.

"Jevanie has the spirit of a man. He would mostly 'par' [hang out] with the big people; him and every one of the big man dem a friend, and a dem him talk with," said Adams.

"But him don't like school none at all. If you don't carry him go to school, him nah go a no school, and him was having a complaint, 'I don't like the school up there'."

Meanwhile, at the Catadupa Primary and Infant School, which Jevanie attended for only four days, Principal Marcia Gordon was visibly battling with her emotions as she remembered her brief bonding time with him.

"I met him on the second day of school, and he said to me, 'I am a goat kid, because that is my last name.' I said to him, 'Goat is K-I-D, and you are K-I-D-D, so don't think of yourself as a goat kid,' and he won a place right here. There is a heaviness in here, in my heart, and we are all hurting," said Gordon.