Let’s find this killer

With the death on Friday of 16-year-old schoolgirl, Rachael Ramkissoon, it is the second time in a month that innocence has become a statistic. The Northeastern College pupil clad in her school uniform was found strangled in bushes at San Rafael on Friday. She was on her way to school.

We offer our deepest condolences to Rachael’s loved ones, at this terrible time. We also urge people to desist from sharing online photos of Rachael’s corpse, as this serves no public good, but further traumatises her family and friends.

As a people we now collectively pause again, and ask why? Why would someone kill this child? And who? Who would do such an evil deed? Rachael was a bright and diligent pupil, studying hard, with ambitions to become a lawyer. Her death has shocked her close-knit community.

She was known to be experienced and cautious in travelling, and not one to get in a strange car.

Further, her death took place in the peaceful, rural setting of Brazil, a place not deemed a crime hotspot.

Again, who could have killed this child and why? Rachael’s death comes as we as a people still try to come to terms with the daylight murder of bank clerk, Shannon Banfield, 20, in a storeroom in the heart of the capital city.

Likewise, we still mourn the unsolved murder of Japanese pannist, Asami Nagakiya, 30, last Carnival at Queens Park Savannah, itself a busy locale. Just as Rachael was studious, so too Shannon was a dedicated to her church-life, even as Asami was a committed player at Phase II Steelband. All were loved.

Public vigils were held for Shannon and Asami, and will now surely also be held for Rachael. Where do we go from here? Firstly, we’d appeal to everyone to fully co-operate with the police investigation, to solve Rachael’s murder, rather than the double-pain of it remaining unsolved. Someone may well have seen something of significance that could just be the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle that gives the vital breakthrough to solve this crime. We urge everyone in the San Rafael/Brazil area to mentally retrace their own movements last Friday and see if they recall anything out of the ordinary, particularly any motor vehicle with a driver behaving suspiciously, or any sighting of Rachael. Anyone with any piece of information, however insignificant, we urge to come forward. Close attention must be paid to conversations in case the killer lets slip an indication of his evil deed.

Details from the public are the police’s best chance to catch the killer.

More broadly, we as a society must ask ourselves some hard questions. We’d all like to dismiss such murderous impulses as an abnormality, but are there prevalent factors that feed it? Where does the callousness and desensitisation come from in warped minds, that grew up in a traditionally easy-going and friendly society? While the police must put the lid on rampant criminality by solving today’s crimes today and so also serve to deter tomorrow’s crimes - where is the criminologist to tell us from where does such predatory sociopathy arise? Is violence instilled is us from aggressive music, gory films, mindless video-games, pornography? Is our self-control being eroded by serotin-depletion, such as by the action of illicit drugs, or harmful food additives? Is it a whole culture of an easy-come/easy-go, typified by disposability, whether of disposable beverage-containers, disposable video-game characters, or now shockingly disposable human- lives? Even as we lobby for Rachael’s killer to be found, we also advocate for more to be done to identify risk-factors and predispositions to violent criminality, with a view to a timely aversion of their manifestation.