SAVAGERY! - Disabled 17-y-o girl stabbed to death as stepmom slept
Published:Wednesday | December 23, 2020 | 12:18 AMCecelia Campbell-Livingston/Gleaner Writer
The rural community of Green Bottom in Sandy Bay was jolted Monday evening by the bizarre murder of a disabled teenage girl who was savagely stabbed while her stepmother reportedly slept in an adjoining room of their Clarendon home.
Shelly-Ann Williams, 17, who has Down syndrome, was discovered, lying face down in a pool of blood, by her father, Howard Williams, and stepmother Shelly-Ann Allen after her dad returned home from work and queried about her whereabouts.
A visibly shaken Allen said that she last heard the teenager laughing in her room while speaking with her father on the phone earlier in the evening.
Allen said that she dozed off shortly after and was awakened when her partner came home.
The death scene was a canvas of brutality, with blood smeared all over the room.
Allen said she was informed by the police that her stepdaughter sustained five stab wounds to the back. She was also stabbed in the neck.
The teenager was discovered naked and is suspected to have been raped.
“All di look wi a look fi di clothes, we can’t find it, and one machete weh did deh pon di kitchen counter, wi can’t find it,” said Allen.
“When you look outside, a pure blood.”
Allen, who recounted how she and her husband had searched frantically for the child before they stumbled on the gruesome discovery, said she was puzzled by the motive behind the killing of a girl described as friendly and loving.
The grief-stricken woman said she could no longer live in the house, wanting instead to return to her native St Elizabeth.
Shelly-Ann’s grandfather, Percival Williams, is also struggling to come to grips with the killing.
“Even though she cannot talk more time, when mi come look fi har, she is like, ‘Dada, you come’,” he told The Gleaner on Tuesday.
The savage attack comes weeks after a Gleaner report that many persons living with disabilities were fearful after the sudden disappearance of Jasmine Deen, a 22-year-old university student who was last seen on February 27.
Deen is feared dead.
Deputy Superintendent of Police Radcliffe Gordon, who works out of the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse, told a Gleaner Editors’ Forum recently that records did not validate claims that a high percentage of children with disabilities were sexually abused in Jamaica.
Detective Inspector Phillip Dodd, who has oversight of criminal investigations at the May Pen Police Station, said that Shelly-Ann Williams appears to have been killed between 7:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Monday.
He declined to pronounce on a suspected motive for her death.
Clarendon has recorded a near 14 per cent fall in murders up to December 19, 2020. Data show that 101 people were slain, 16 fewer than for the corresponding period last year.