Boy with sickle-cell disease among New Year’s gun salute victims
Published:Wednesday | January 5, 2022 | 12:09 AMAndre Williams/Staff Reporter
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If battling sickle-cell disease was not tough enough, a nine-year-old boy’s family is eager for him to be discharged from The Bustamante Hospital for Children in St Andrew after being admitted on New Year’s Day with a gunshot wound. The boy,...
If battling sickle-cell disease was not tough enough, a nine-year-old boy’s family is eager for him to be discharged from The Bustamante Hospital for Children in St Andrew after being admitted on New Year’s Day with a gunshot wound.
The boy, Jahvan Wynter, remains hospitalised, reportedly with a low blood count, after he was struck by a single bullet that pierced the roof of his Nelson Road, Kingston 11, home as he slept.
About 2:30 a.m. on January 1, that round, one of dozens fired by men celebrating the new year with illegal gun salutes, rained down on rooftops in the yard, according to his grandmother, Ina McCalla.
“It (stray bullets) come over all the while, but is the first it ever do that damage. I said to my daughter it come in like dem a climb tree, because how it reach in here, we don’t know nothing about gunshots,” McCalla said.
A resident of the Greater Maxfield Park community, McCalla has grown accustomed, over 40 years, to the spine-chilling sound of gun salutes.
“All when nothing not going on, we cannot sleep at nights. Sometime a morning time I get up and say to my daughter, you know last night I couldn’t sleep and the heart start on me,” she said, pointing to medication that helps to suppress palpitations.
Several satellite communities with arterial corridors linked to Maxfield Avenue are plagued by criminal violence and the wild celebrations of gun-toting youths drunk with braggadocio.
But this year, said McCalla, the gun salutes were even more unrestrained.
“Dem do it extra this time because the ones who use to do it, they are not there anymore. So these little young ones that coming up, they are very terrible,” McCalla told The Gleaner.
Young Jahvan had given up his single bed to a visitor and opted to share space on a larger bed with three others, including his mother, older brother, and another child.
McCalla remembers hearing screams and discovering that the bloodstained sheet and the spent shell inside the room.
Jahvan, a grade four student, missed out on Monday’s start of the new academic term and resumption of face-to-face classes at Rosseau Primary School.
McCalla said her daughter is staying with the injured child at the hospital and they took comfort in knowing that the X-ray analysis has shown no fracture.
Jahvan’s injury resurrects memories of the wounding of a 15-year-old girl on January 1, 2020, on the fringes of a churchyard in Mount Salem, St James, in what was believed to have been a gun salute as part of New Year’s celebrations.
She successfully underwent surgery at Falmouth Hospital in Trelawny to remove a bullet from her forehead.
Hours into the new year of 2022, the police published an advisory urging persons to discontinue the illegal practice of gun salutes. The constabulary reported five injuries between the St Catherine North and St Andrew South police divisions.