The Mad Bull’s Blog, Version 3

Seems that there is a trend in Jamaica now for gunmen to focus on entertainers. Apparently several of them have been robbed recently. YardFlex.com currently has up a post about one such entertainer, Spice, and her story about how she was robbed. There are a few things that occurred to me reading that story. The first thing was the locale in which the robbery occurred. The second was what the thieves got away with and the third, how lucky she was that she wasn’t raped or filled full of lead.

Now, the post said that she lived in a Mannings Hill Road apartment. Thats JUST around the corner from where I was living up until a few months before I flashed Jamaica! That whole area is under the guns of the Grants Pen bad man dem, and as you go up Mannings Hill Road, you have to start to worry about the gunmen from the Red Hills Road area as well! There is more, if you’re interested…

These should be nice places in which to live, but unfortunately, the majority of people who live in these areas don’t have the money to pay to Hawkeye Security or to the other security companies that provide rapid armed response, and so the gunmen from neighbouring communities have more of a free hand to do as they wish in these neighbourhoods.

Yeah, there is some amount of crime in Cherry Gardens and Norbrook and Jacks Hill (these are some well-to-do suburbs in the ‘Upper St. Andrew’ environs), but nowhere near the same level of crime as in Mannings Hill and its environs, based upon my experience. Of course, the crime does increase exponentially as you go into areas inhabited by people with lower income than those in Mannings Hill, and so on and so on, until you end up with places like Seaview Gardens which is crime central!. A Mannings Hill type of neighbourhood would look as though it were crime free if compared to an area like Seaview Gardens. Everything is relative.

Basically, the government does not seem to be able to provide proper security in Jamaica so you have to provide it for yourself. You have to get your own gun(s) and be trained and prepared to use them, or you have to pay protection money to the bad men, or you have to hire your own, private security personnel or you have to leave Jamaica. If you can’t afford to do any of these things, well, dog can nyam you supper (bad things can happen to you at any time!) at any time!

Secondly, you see what the gunman got away with in this robbery?! J$150,000 in cash, J$300,000 in jewellery, expensive shoes and an assortment of other stuff. Thats not a bad haul, I think. J$150,000 is some good walk around cash, don’t you think? Lets see, thats about US$2,300! Wow! Now, Spice is a DJ or something like that, but to be honest, she must be relatively new in the business, because I can’t think of one song that I know that she sings. I have seen her onstage on Hype TV (saw this while I was chilling at Corner Pocket at the bar on Monday night, they have TVs there) but I don’t think she is all that popular yet. Still, look at her “walk around” cash and her bling! The music business must be really good, rasta! No wonder every youth is trying to get into it nowadays! Hmph… if I was twenty years younger, I think I would give it a go myself. I am not saying I would quit my day job, but I would spend some of my night times building riddims and writing lyrics and trying to put together some wicked dancehall music, thats for sure! Wow!

Thirdly, I really think that Spice was lucky that the gunman didn’t drop plenty licks pon her, and that she didn’t get raped! Actually, I am only assuming that she didn’t get raped!, She says she resisted him when he wanted to rape her, but she didn’t really say that she wasn’t raped. I will assume she wasn’t raped though. That is some really good luck on her part. Even more lucky though was that the gunman didn’t just kill her. So often in Jamaica, the gunmen, having taken all your material possessions, still want to perform the coup de grace and pump their poor victims full of lead! Savage bastards!

I guess her strategy of assisting him and facilitating him in his robbery attempt really worked! I have heard of many instances where people who pursued the same strategy were not so lucky however. Some people feel that the best strategy in these situations is to seize your first opportunity and try to fight and resist the gunmen. That has worked in some cases, but sadly, not in all. I guess there is really no surefire approach which can guarantee that you come out of an experience like this alive, I guess. If its your time, I guess its just your time. People can postulate all they want to as to what is the best thing to do, under similar circumstances, but I guess you have to weigh each situation for yourself! Spice seems to have made the right one for her set of circumstances. As she says, “I didn’t want to take any chances and then him shoot me over material possessions. I can work back that once I have my life, so I just allowed him to take whatever he needed… “. Material possessions is not all.

Tags: How Awful //