The death of innocence

We are chilled by the very notion that is now under consideration that the father was made to watch a gunman murder his child before he too was shot dead.

This is beyond all humanity.

It would have been shocking enough if Solomon had been murdered in front of his daughter, left as a traumatised witness. It would have been horrific enough if Saleesha had been recklessly killed as so called collateral damage in a volley of shots aimed in her father’s direction.

But this is a new low: that the assailant chose to murder an innocent five-year-old and do so with the deliberate intention of punishing her father by making him watch, before he too was similarly killed. This is too much.

It’s also a new low for a society that for far too long now has had to mouth that awful phrase, “new low” regarding the murder of men, women and children.

On Old Year’s night of 2003 the nation was shocked when threeyear- old Reba Aaliyah Aberdeen of Coconut Drive, Morvant, was accidentally shot dead by a stray bullet from persons celebrating the new year by shooting off firearms in the melee of fireworks.

We mourned and hoped humanity would pause for thought to protect our precious children.

Sadly, in the intervening years we have seen an all too regular killing of children, often by sexual predators but sometimes also seemingly as a proxy in a broader ongoing row between adult players.

Akiel (Chambers), Tecia (Henry), Keyana (Cumberbatch), Hope (Arismandez), Amy Emily (Annamuthodo), Daniel (Guerra), Sean Luke (Lumfai), Jodal (Ramnath) and Jenice (Figaro) are names we must never forget.

We face a double whammy of our country becoming a more violent place and ironically our population, simply for their psychological survival, becoming more inured to such violence.

On top of that, we face crimes of sexual predation upon children and of assailants seeking to punish adults by harming/killing their children, on both counts children being unwittingly dragged into the adult space.

Our suggestion to counter this trend is to sound out loud to one and all that an adult is an adult and a child is a child.

Society has a role to pay in ensuring that a child’s role, responsibilities and deportment, are not that of an adult. Likewise, assailants must maintain this distinction and never drag a minor into any murderous dispute between adults.

While many facets of modern life such as Internet communication and trends in fashion, film and pop music may tend to blur the lines between teen and adult, in all above-mentioned cases of child-murder, including Saleesha, involved victims who were nowhere near their teen years and so could not be mistaken for adults.

The assailants knew they were dealing with children, yet sadly decided to still proceed with their heinous murders.

Our feelings on the latest outrage are perhaps best expressed by Saleesha’s grief-stricken grandfather, Peter Joseph.

“That is the Devil himself.

How could you watch a little child like that and kill her? This is a little child, an angel.” Generally, we are a people who love our children, as thousands of parents, grandparents and guardians toil each day to maintain their children, the most precious thing in many of our lives.

That is why the death of Saleesha (and the other children prior) is a dagger in the heart of us all.

May she rest in peace.