Grave mistake corrected - 11-year-old to finally rest after burial mix-up

Two weeks after the burial of a body mistakenly believed to be his, 11-year-old OBrien Gooden will finally be laid to rest this Saturday.

Gooden's funeral took place on February 17 in Bog Walk, St Catherine, and a body was interred in the Gooden family plot. However, it was later discovered that the wrong body had been buried.

The body laid to rest was that of 12-year-old Omarco Brown from Snake Hill district, Point Hill, St Catherine.

Omarco's body was exhumed late Friday night to correct the error, allowing for the placement of Gooden's remains in the grave.

Gooden's mother, Toni-Ann Alexander, nearly revolted at his funeral two weeks ago, insisted that the body in the glass casket was not his. At the time she was told that her son's physical characteristics may have been altered to to the fact that he died of drowning and his body was in storage.

O'Brien, fondly called 'Dantae', drowned in the Rio Cobre in Bog Walk, St Catherine, on December 26, 2023. His body was found the following day. The other boy, Omarco, according to police reports, died of a gunshot wound on December 2.

Since the mix-up of the bodies was confirmed, Alexander has been pushing for her son to get a 'proper funeral'. However, it appears unlikely that he will be getting the 'home-going' ceremony she thinks he deserves. She said that other members of the boy's family have told her a service will be held at the graveside after which there will be a burial.

"Dem seh dem a guh put up a tent, which part the yard deh, beside the grave, and dem just a guh duh sumi deh suh," Alexander told THE STAR.

The mother of two told THE STAR that the entire ordeal has affected her health.

"Mi stress out, mi cah sleep a night time, mi pressure high, mi gah doctor only fi see mi have high blood pressure," said the 30-year-old mother of two.

"Mi feel depressed, mi heart feel heavy, it nuh fair to mi baby him deserve better than that," she said.

O'Brien's father, Kenroy Gooden, has declined further comments on the matter, while the funeral home director referred the news team to his attorney-at-law.

In the meantime, Mayor of Spanish Town, Norman Scott, who signed the exhumation order last Friday, said further regulation of the 'after life' industry is needed to prevent heartaches being experienced by the boys' families.

"I am now seeing where there are foul-ups in the identity of bodies, and I will say this is being perpetuated by the proliferation of suitcase funeral homes," Scott told THE STAR.

He added: "I can almost recall sometime last year, maybe in the later part of last year, there was a similar kind of foul-up as a result of the same kind of funeral home ... a suitcase funeral home," the mayor said.

The term suitcase funeral homes is used to describe undertakers lack the facilities to store and preserve human remains.

"What they do is that they rent spaces from the more well-to-do funeral homes, and so, at times, they go to collect the body and as a result the wrong bodies are processed and buried," Scott said.

"What I think needs to be done is that the Ministry of Health needs to put a policy in place to regulate funeral homes, and that will put an end to the kind of free for all that is happening now in the system," Scott said.