From 14-year-old Teresita McGregor to 10-year-old Scottie Andrew to 11-year-old Marco Archer and now 4-year-old D’Onya “Bella” Walker we have done little to punish those who inflict violence on children!
NASSAU| Long before the heinous murder of Marco Archer took place, violence against children goes unspoken in the Bahamas. The anger of the society only appears to surface when the crime is exposed in the glare of the public and then our fake disgust and outrage becomes visible.
Bahamas Press has long argued that the worst of the worst is met when children become victims in their innocence. Anyone who disagrees with that sits on the side of the wicked in our country.
Ten-year-old Scottie Andrew didn’t return home back on October 3rd, 1994. While walking home from a game room in the area of Baillou Hill Road with his 12-year-old friend, the boys came across a man by the name Clayton Cox. He was 33-years-old at the time.
Cox jumped off a wall where he sat and grabbed both boys by the necks as he dragged them through a shortcut releasing one and demanding he return with a rug while holding Andrew still in a headlock.
The witness then saw Cox take Andrew into an abandoned house. Four days later police were called to a location in the back of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in the area near a boundary wall where they found the remains of the young child, pants pulled down, body decomposing, dead from a blow to the head and covered with that rug and plywood. WHAT IS THIS?!
On November 12th, 1998 Cox was found guilty of murder – FOUR YEARS LATER – and was sentenced to hang. Eight years later, while awaiting his sentence, a 2006 ruling of the Privy Council declared mandatory death sentencing unconstitutional. Therefore Cox was sentenced to life in prison on March 30th, 2010, some 16 years after the life of a child was snuffed out in the Bahamas by a sick man who was protected by an ailing and archaic criminal justice system.
An appeal of his conviction handed down a 50-year sentence from the date of his conviction. Where is Clayton Cox today?
Perhaps, if we pay closer attention as a society to what is happening to the innocent across the Bahamas, more of our problems will be solved? But what has changed from the 1967 rape and murder of 14-year-old Teresita McGregor to the 1994 murder of 10-year-old Scottie Andrew to 2011 abduction and mutilation of 11-year-old Marco Archer to the death of 4-year-old D’Onya “Bella” Walker and countless others who suffer from such violence?
The time has come as a nation for the Bahamas to fix this pandemic of violence. It starts with preventing the violence committed against young children!
We ga report and let yinner decide!
