This past Saturday morning, I had an 8 a.m. appointment to meet with Ya Ya Marin Coleman for general discussion. This was at the Hyde family home corner Regent Street West and West Canal, where I usually sell newspapers on Saturday morning. The energetic and effervescent Ya Ya was early.
During our conversation, Ya Ya mentioned a chilling sequence of events which had taken place on Friday evening, about 14 hours before. Senator Godwin Hulse had called her to say that he was with the mother of a teenage girl who had gone missing on Wednesday, that they had been quite reliably informed that the body had been found, and he and her mother were on the way to the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital morgue to identify the body.
This took place while Deseree Cain was in the process of reading KREM Radio’s Friday 6 p.m. news. As Ya Ya explained, Nyahbinghi Melanie, who was in the newsroom, then went to see Deseree in the on-air radio studio. Because of their justified confidence in the Senator’s credibility, the ladies decided to break the story of the discovery of the missing teenager’s body.
At some point after that, it became known that the missing teenager’s body had not been found and was not at the KHMH morgue. This became known after the mother arrived at the morgue.
Ya Ya left from #1 West Canal around 8:45 a.m., because I had another appointment. On KREM Radio’s 9 a.m. newscast shortly after Ya Ya’s departure, they featured an audiotaped clip from Senator Hulse, explaining briefly how the unfortunate snafu had occurred on Friday evening.
I left #1 West Canal after 11 a.m. on Saturday morning and arrived at #5861 Seashore Drive around 11:30 or so. Shortly after that, the taximan Cornelio Day arrived there to deliver something, and he said to me that they had discovered the body of the missing teenager. I was sure Mr. Day was talking out of his hat, so to speak. He said to me, however, that the mother of the girl had been on LOVE FM about 9:30 a.m. or so to say that she had identified the body. At this point, I had to shake my head. Were there cobwebs in it?
I decided to listen to the 12:30 p.m. LOVE news. Yes, the body had been found on Saturday morning off the Western Highway near the Burdon Canal Bridge about 6 miles outside of Belize City. It was in a bag, badly decomposed, and would have to be buried quickly.
I called Ya Ya. She could only say that there had been several search parties out on Friday. A member of one of these search parties had told the teenager’s mother on Friday evening that “they” had found her child’s body and she should go to the morgue to identify it. That was when Senator Hulse, who was with the mother at the time, called Ya Ya.
You can see the absolute insanity here. In a sense, the body of Neisa Pipersburgh was found twice in the space of 14 hours, but the first finding was not a finding: It was only the report of a finding. Was it that somebody knew the girl was dead, and wanted the family and the authorities to know, but that same somebody didn’t want the murderer(s) to know that “they” had been the source of the information? What the hell is this?
Given the primitive state of Belize’s forensics, 14 hours would have made a difference in the quality of the post-mortem. This is an astounding story here. The suggestion is that the community is so horrified that they are afraid to report murders even after they have already happened for days.
And, this was a horrific murder. The young lady had just graduated from Pallotti High School a few days before she went missing. My wife has been telling me for years, Pallotti is the high school with the strongest discipline in the City. You will not normally graduate from Pallotti unless you are walking the straight and narrow. (Senator Hulse’s wife, incidentally, is the Pallotti vice-principal.)
Over the last few years, we have begun to get used to reports of these missing teenaged girls. About 8 or 9 years ago, the nation was badly traumatized by the consecutive disappearances of five young girls, who were all later discovered dead and mutilated. Since then, almost all these missing girl reports have turned out to be otherwise from tragic. Because it is usually a boyfriend thing, citizens have even become somewhat disinterested.
I remember, somewhat, the phone call from Neisa Pipersburgh’s mother to KREM Radio this week. I believe I remember her saying she had been calling all the other radio stations. (Ya Ya informed me on Sunday evening that the call had been on Thursday morning, and that it was from Neisa’s aunt, not her mother.) But, there was also a mother on television this week, very much distraught, with a similar complaint, and I believed that turned out happily. So, you see, these things have been happening, and happening, and happening …
But, they haven’t been ending like this. Not in the City, and not for a long while. It’s been just young gangsters shooting each other, shooting innocent bystanders, throwing grenades, yea, yea, yea. Crazy Southside youth. As mad as things have been, in order to preserve our sanity, we have had to develop some calloused indifference.
This time, however, that will not work. If we are scared before we are outraged, then indeed we can truly say that, as a community, we are lost. And the sequence of events that I have recounted suggests, on the face of it, that someone was scared before and more than he or she was outraged. We await a full and complete inquiry. We demand it.