“DADDY, don’t kill Mommy” was the earnest cry of a 12-year-old girl when her father chased her mother and shot her before killing himself on Waltham Park Road yesterday. Prior to beseeching her father, the girl had told her mother to run when she saw her father heading towards her with a gun.

Moments later she cried “Daddy kill Mommy” as she bolted along Woodpecker Avenue onto Willow Drive where her mother Rouleene Clarke-Gowans had been living since January, when she moved out of the matrimonial house in Portmore, St Catherine. The child, who had been heading to a high school in Kingston when her father Patrick Gowans aborted his task to take her to school after he saw her mother along the roadway, feared the worst.

Her cries were not enough, neither was her strength when she tried to prevent him from killing her mother, days before her 13th birthday. The subdued pre-teen gave bits and pieces of how the murder-suicide unfolded as relatives and representatives from her high school consoled her.(Jamaica Observer)…[+]