(Jamaica Observer) For the second time in 12 years, a family has been left distraught following the brutal killing of a mother of five children in the Heartease community here.
May 31 this year marked 12 years since the brutal killing of Patricia Clayton in the community. Her daughter, 36-year-old Shanalee Bailey, was yesterday stabbed to death, allegedly by the father of four of her children. Both mother and daughter were newspaper vendors for the Jamaica Observer in years past.
Bailey was found in a pool of blood on the floor of her one-bedroom house, which she shared with four of her children, shortly after 2:00 pm.
Police have launched a manhunt for the children’s father.
“I usually see her every day, but I didn’t see her today [when] I walk… and she would call to me… When I was driving from my house I saw police and crowd. When I asked what is happening, somebody told me that dem find Shana dead in the house in blood. I [asked] the little boy [Bailey’s son], ‘Where is your father?’ The little boy said him gone a Mandeville. I keep asking and nobody has seen the father,” Bailey’s uncle, Stafford Clayton, told the Observer yesterday.
He alleges that the accused had threatened to kill his niece.
“He [came] to my barbershop in Mandeville…and asked me to talk to Shana, because he said she is too ‘ignorant’. I went to Shana and asked her why she and [the accused] can’t live good. She told me that he is miserable and is a ‘maama man’, because if he buys a cabbage and some rice, he wants to cook it by himself. Mi say [to her], ‘Unnu must live good,’ and this is what I saw today,” Clayton explained.
“I don’t know her to be a troublemaker. She and everybody get on. She wanted to be on her own, because her mother was killed 12 years ago on her [mother’s] birthday… right around there they cut her throat, and this is what come happen to her daughter,” he said.
Relatives told the Observer that the accused had moved out of the one-bedroom house he shared with Bailey and their four children and had since been living nearby.
“A nice, decent person she was. Mi head mash up. Her mother used to sell paper for the Observer and Shana used to sell paper, too. She was hard-working. She nuh take nutten serious, she just jovial,” Michelle McLean, a cousin of the deceased, said yesterday.
Bailey leaves behind five children, ages 16, eight, six, four, and two.
