8 years ago
Monday, August 12, 2013
Transgender teen, murdered by mob
Dwayne Jones, 16 at the time of his demise, was always relentlessly teased in high school for being effeminate until he eventually dropped out.
His father not only kicked him out of the house at the age of 14 but also helped jeering neighbors push the kid from the rough Jamaican slum where he grew up.
By age of 16, the teenager was k*lled, in a manner one wouldn't even wish for his/her enemy'
The youngster was beaten, stabbed, shot and ran over by a car when he showed up at a street party dressed as a woman.
His mistake was confiding to a friend that he was attending a "straight"(non-homosexual) party as a girl for the first time in his life.
"When I saw Dwayne's body, I started shaking and crying," said Khloe, one of three transgender friends who shared a derelict house with the teenager in the hills above the north coast city of Montego Bay.
Like many transgender and gay people in Jamaica, Khloe wouldn't give a full name out of fear.
"It was horrible.
It was so, so painful to see him like that."
Police spokesman Steve Brown said detectives working the case are struggling to overcome a chronic problem: a strong anti-informant culture that makes eyewitnesses to murders and other crimes too afraid or simply unwilling to come forward.
Even though some 300 people were at the dance party in the small riverside community of Irwin, police have yet to make a single arrest in Dwayne's murder.
Police say witnesses have said they couldn't see the attackers' faces.
Dwayne was the center of attraction shortly after arriving in a taxi at 2am with his two 23-year-old housemates, Khloe and Keke.
Dwayne's expert dance moves, long legs and high cheekbones quickly made him the one that all the guys were trying to get next to.
Like most Jamaican homosexuals, Dwayne was careful about confiding in others about his s*xual orientation.
But when he saw a girl he had known from church, he told her he was attending the party in drag.
Minutes later, according to Khloe and Keke, the girl's male friends gathered around Dwayne in the dimly-lit street asking: "Are you a woman or a man?" One man waved a lighter's flame near Dwayne's sneakers, asking whether a girl could have such big feet.
Then, his friends said, another man grabbed a lantern from an outdoor bar and walked over to Dwayne, shining the bright light over him from head to toe.
"It's a man," he concluded, while the others hissed "batty boy" and other anti-gay epithets.
Khloe says she tried to steer him away from the crowd, whispering in Dwayne's ear: "Walk with me, walk with me." But Dwayne pulled away, loudly insisting to partygoers that he was a girl.
When someone behind him snapped his bra strap, the teen panicked and raced down the street.
But he couldn't run fast enough to escape the mob.
The teenager was viciously assaulted and apparently half-conscious for some two hours before another sustained attack finished him off, according to Khloe, who was also beaten and nearly raped.
She hid in a nearby church and then the surrounding woods, unable to call for help because she didn't have her cellphone.
Dwayne's father in the Montego Bay slum of North Gully didn't want to talk about his son's life or death.
The teen's family wouldn't even claim the corpse, according to Dwayne's friends.
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