Deadly determination

Jamaica Gleaner | 2025-12-01 | Original Article

As Hurricane Melissa pummelled Smithfield in Westmoreland, 50-year-old Vincent Fisher worked frantically to protect his concrete home. He tried to clear a fallen tree, secure shattered windows, and sweep water from the flooded front room.

 

Outside, the storm raged with 185-mile-per-hour winds hurling debris through the air. Inside, his children begged him to stop and shelter with them in a safer back room. He refused.

 

Hours later, Fisher was found unresponsive in the bathroom. His children believe he suffered a heart attack. Only after his death did they learn he had been hiding a serious heart condition from them.

 

Fisher and Cleveland Wayne Jeffery, a farmer and animal lover, are believed to be among the recorded 45 deaths linked to Hurricane Melissa. The Government is yet to name the dead or the missing.

 

Fisher and Jeffery’s deaths have left their families with grief, unanswered questions, and the difficult task of rebuilding amid widespread destruction.

 

Travis Fisher is still trying to make sense of his father’s behaviour that day – determined, defiant, and strangely focused on doing as much as he could before the storm worsened.

 

“The breeze was hard and the force of it burst out the window in the front room. The rest of the family was in the back room and he was out there sweeping out the water. A tree fell down and he went outside in the rain to try to clear it,” Travis recalled.

 

“We tell him to come around in the other room that is safe, and he never wanted to come around there with us. He just stayed in the bathroom by himself,” he explained.

 

Later that evening, the senior Fisher was found sitting on a container in their unfinished bathroom, unresponsive but still showing faint signs of life. With the storm making roads impassable, medical aid was unreachable. Besides, nearby public health facilities like the Savanna-la-Mar Hospital were facing their own crises with the destruction of critical buildings.

 

With the help of neighbours, who braved the storm and ran to assist, Travis lifted his father on to a bed in the back room – ironically into the same room he had refused to enter earlier, his son reflected. There, as the family huddled together listening to the chaos outside, his body grew cold.

 

“That makes me vex because he never wanted to come around there, and, see it there, him still end up around there. If he did just listen to me, everything would have been alright,” cried Travis, noting that an autopsy had not been performed as yet.

 

“It’s like him sleep away in a coma or something. We got to find out that none of us knew that he was sick with his heart,” said Travis, looking on in bewilderment as he spoke. “Him never tells us. He told his friends and is them come tell we after he is dead.

 

“Those are the things that he was keeping from us, and sometimes you live with people, even family, and you think you know what is going on with them when you truly don’t know,” he continued sombrely. “Because that is my father, and we didn’t know what was going on. I really feel a way about that.”

 

Last Friday, friends and relatives described Fisher as hardworking, cheerful, and generous with his catch when returning from sea. Even during the hurricane, he had insisted on securing his fishing boat in the yard.

 

A few miles away in Cottage district, the family of Cleveland Wayne Jeffery had just buried him. The repast was sombre yet lively, with music playing and food cooking. They celebrated his life, though some residents of the area believed he died foolishly.

 

Jeffery was found dead near the spot where he had tied his cows before the storm. Relatives believe that, as the winds intensified, he went out to check on them.

 

“I feel it for him to know that he had his animals raising and, because of his animals, [he died]. He was trying to take care of them before the water come down on them. That’s why him go out to loosen then and he got trapped. It ended up that his neck broke. But it is not easy for us. He was a good guy,” said older brother Ranford Jeffery.

 

“He is a man who always loved his animals from childhood. If you want you and him to have anything, you play with his animals,” added cousin Tanya Clarke-Smith.

 

She recalled how another relative cautiously revealed the ill-fated news of Cleveland’s passing two days afterwards. Still, he could not prevent her from breaking down, she said.

 

“We are a close-knitted family and he will truly be missed,” Clarke-Smith told The Gleaner.

 

Brandon Thomas, CEO of BT Thomas Funeral Home, who officiated the burial, described the days after the hurricane as overwhelming. His team retrieved about a dozen bodies under dangerous conditions, many from Whitehouse. More deaths followed in the weeks after.

 

Some victims, they explained, had been alone for days before discovery; their bodies were severely decomposed. Others were preserved by desperate means. One man’s head was almost severed by a sheet of zinc, Thomas recalled as he outlined some of the cases.

 

“We were called for one body and ended up picking up eight. It was like a taxi stand; everyone was calling us here and there, telling us ‘there is one here and one over there’. COVID-19 was worse, but this one was very bad based on the number of pickups that we had in one day,” he explained.

 

He recalled how a lady in Whitehouse dumped heaps of salt on her dead spouse’s body to preserve it for three days after the storm.

 

“She had to go back in the [old] days, and put the body under salt till we got there, and, actually, when we got there, the body was good,” he said. “It looked like she bought about 50 pounds of salt.

 

“Another body was kept in an old fridge with ice on it,” he listed, looking at photographs of the bodies.

 

Last Friday, Abigail Malcolm, People’s National Party councillor for the Cornwall Mountain division, was raising funds to bury a constituent who had no relatives.

 

While hosting a health fair with University of the West Indies representatives, she criticised what she called unequal government distribution of relief.

 

“It looks pretty and dandy when the Government comes into Parliament and talks, but, on the ground, it is a different thing. It is not easy,” said Malcolm.

 

She recounted meeting a mother sheltering under a tarpaulin.

 

“Just imagine you meet a mother with a baby – the baby is three years old – and, when I took the baby, he had on just the receiver and [diapers]. The mother had no clothes for the baby.”

 

At the health fair, clinical psychologists Shelly Uh and Dr Justine Stewart spent much of their day focussing on traumatised children. The aim was to offer them a safe space away from the destruction and devastation back home, they said.

 

“We are giving them therapeutic activities, emotional regulation strategies so that they are able to process some of what happened. It is just a start, but we hope that it is getting them engaged. These kids are very resilient, and, even though they have gone through all of this, there is still a lot of hope in them,” said Uh.

 

“When you talk to them, you realise that there is a lot of stress in terms of them not being able to go to school after seeing what happened. So we are hoping that we can create a little of a safe space, and have someone to talk to. But they like to connect with each other, so that is nice,” she said.

 

corey.robinson@gleanerjm.com

 

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