(Jamaica Observer) Marlene Lyons, the mother of slain taxi driver Oshane McLennon, believes he was senselessly gunned down by criminals who once lived in the Majesty Gardens community which he called home.
McLennon, in an attempt to escape his killers, tried to run towards the Duhaney Park police station when he was executed at the intersection of Washington Boulevard and Duhaney Drive last Saturday.
Lyons told the Jamaica Observer yesterday that a threat was sent to the south St Andrew community after a man was killed nearby.
“Dem seh anybody dem ketch from round here, dem ago kill. A so now him see dem and apparently him see dem and a run, but him couldn’t reach to the police station cause him know dem,” Lyons said.
The constabulary’s Corporate Communications Unit reported that at approximately 1:10 pm, McLennon parked the motor car he was driving and was standing on Washington Boulevard when he was pounced upon by armed men on a motorcycle who chased him and shot him multiple times.
McLennon, who plies the Duhaney Park to downtown Kingston route, was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead.
The mother of four said she was walking with her sister in the community when a woman told her that McLennon, otherwise called Tariq and Landlord, was killed.
When her sister refused to accompany her to the scene, she said she walked to the top of the street that leads to Spanish Town Road, where a taxi operator offered to take her to the location.
“When I went there mi see him lying on the ground on his back, and I started to cry. Mi seh look how dem do mi pickney,” the subdued mother said as she stood on her veranda.
“Mi pickney not even talk to people — a so him stay — and dem kill me pickney for nothing at all. Dem kill mi pickney like mi pickney a animal,” she lamented.
Admitting that her third son started operating her car as a taxi little less than a year after he was laid off from his job at a manufacturing company on Marcus Garvey Drive, Lyons declared that her son was not a wrongdoer.
“My children don’t dwell in wrongs, that is how I grow them,” said Lyons.
McLennon is the second taxi driver killed in the St Andrew South Police Division in recent days, despite a state of public emergency being in effect in the area.
In the previous incident, 37-year-old Akeeno Britton, otherwise called Bubinile, of Ambrook Lane, was driving a Toyota Isis motor car along Washington Boulevard in Kingston 20 when he allegedly got into an altercation with the driver of a Jamaica Urban Transit Company bus. The argument escalated and Britton was fatally stabbed.
The bus driver, 37-year-old Oral Clarke, has since been charged with murder.
According to Lyons, her son started cutting his work hours following Britton’s murder.
“Mi seh ‘Tariq try come off the road early. Try come in early, and when mi a call yuh phone to answer your phone. If yuh nuh answer your phone mi can’t know what is what’.
“Mi call him every second, every five minutes. Him seh ‘mommy mi can’t answer the phone every minute because mi a drive’ and mi seh ‘alright, ek sure yuh start come off a di road early’. Him start come off a di road by 6 o’clock,” said Lyons as she declared that she was not expecting her son to die in such a manner.
