Unbelievable anguish Family, community mourn murdered 10-y-o

Aston Coke stood frozen in absolute despair on Tuesday night, his eyes locked on the dirt track in Tyre, Trelawny, where detectives methodically processed the crime scene.

Down in the bushes lay his little girl, 10-year-old Shani Coke—affectionately known to her heartbroken family as ‘Kaidra’—who was found partially nude, her throat slashed in a senseless act of unimaginable cruelty. For hours, her sick father could only watch the flashing police lights cut through the darkness, unable to wake up from the nightmare that had landed squarely on his doorstep.

Shani, the second of four daughters, was the pride of her neighbourhood—a bright, well-mannered angel who “mashed up” her academics at Troy Primary School.

“My daughter was the nicest little girl you would have ever meet,” her weeping father said. “She was a sweet and caring little girl, and the entire neighbourhood loved her. Kaja was just the perfect child. She mash up her academics at Troy Primary School and she just did what she had to do.”

On the fateful evening, Shani was sent to a nearby shop to buy meat. Normally, her little cousin walked with her as a safeguard. But in a cruel twist of fate, her cousin had fallen off his bicycle earlier that day and was too bruised to make the trip. Shani walked to the shop alone. She never made it back. A frantic search of the community followed before the devastating discovery of the child’s body.

The horrific discovery hit Coke while he was trapped in his sickbed, currently battling colon cancer. A frantic, screaming phone call from Shani’s mother shattered his world in an instant.

“When her mother told me, I told her that nothing couldn’t go suh,” he recalled. “I just start screaming same time. All now I can’t believe, and I just keep begging God to put back the life in my daughter. I just can’t believe that this reach at my doorstep.”

He had last seen his bubbly little girl on Saturday, dressed up and glowing, on her way to a local treat. She had run over to him with her trademark smile: “Daddy, mi come look for you.” It was the last time he would ever see her alive.

“She was very happy. I didn’t know it was the last time I was going to see my child. Is four daughters mi have, enuh... and people will tell you that I grow them like white fowl. They are always inside and taxi carry dem to and from school. Shani wasn’t living with me, but she was also grown inside. We don’t even send our children to other people yard to do homework or anything at all,” Coke said.

The heartbreak is compounded by a bitter, sickening rage. According to Coke, the prime suspect, Delroy Coke, recently came back into the farming community. Investigators said he was a convicted sexual offender who had previously served time in prison for sexual offences.

“I told his father not to bring him back in the community because this boy is known to take set on children,” the angry father Coke revealed. “I run a little business and I see him come buy file and machete, and I told him mi nuh want him to go up there and molest mi daughter... He has been getting in trouble and molesting children for a while now, so that was why we didn’t want him back in the place.”

As news of the discovery surged through the tight-knit farming district, horror quickly turned to bloodthirsty vengeance. An enraged mob of community members tracked down the suspect and his father, viciously chopping both men with machetes in a bloody display of street justice. Delroy Coke died while his father is hospitalised.