The Yard Report — straight from Kingston. No party line. Just yard.
NEW KINGSTON: ANOTHER BODY, SAME QUESTIONS
Friday night, 9:40 p.m., Kensington Court, New Kingston. A 61-year-old Colombian national gunned down at an apartment complex with one entrance and one exit — a fact the gunmen apparently knew before the residents did.
Police are saying transnational organised crime. They’re also saying the case is “isolated” from the other recent murders in the area. Both things can be true. Neither is reassuring.
The math, for those who weren’t keeping score: the St Andrew Central Police Division had recorded nine murders by April 18. We are now nine days past April 18 and the count has continued. New Kingston, the supposedly secure commercial-residential corridor, has had a man killed with a boulder on Trafalgar Road, a separate gun murder near Trinidad Terrace and Grenada Crescent, and now this. The official explanation that some of these involve homeless populations is meant to be calming. It is not calming. It is a different problem.
Residents of Kensington Court spent Saturday morning counting bullet holes in their own cars. The Yard Report will not be commenting on the security minister’s recent statements about civil society oversight. The vehicles in the apartment complex will speak for themselves.
FREE AFTER 15 YEARS — AND WHO PAYS FOR THE 15?
Two St Catherine men, Kimarley Fortella and Kestner Murray, walked out of prison Friday after the Court of Appeal quashed their 2014 murder convictions. The Court ruled the convictions were “unsafe.”
Fifteen years inside. For a killing the courts now say they didn’t commit.
The Yard Report wishes them well, and wishes them whatever quiet dignity is still available after that kind of state-sponsored erasure of a decade and a half of life. The legal system is congratulating itself for having corrected the error. The rest of us notice that the error took fifteen years to correct and that nobody is on the line for it.
Compensation conversations have begun. They will go on for years. The men are now in their forties.
BANK OF JAMAICA: WHO’S NEXT?
Finance Minister Fayval Williams announced Monday that the search has begun for a successor to BOJ Governor Richard Byles, whose term ends August 18.
The next BOJ Governor will inherit: an inflation rate that has been notionally tamed, a currency that is notionally stable, a financial sector that is notionally well-regulated, and a national conversation about debt that nobody in office wants to have.
The Yard Report is not nominating anyone. The Yard Report is observing that the search committee has roughly four months to find someone with the credentials, the political acceptability, and the willingness to defend interest rate decisions to a public that experiences them in supermarket aisles. Good luck.
SEAFORTH HIGH AND JAMAICA COLLEGE: THE SCHOOLS ARE IN CRISIS
Peace and Love in Society (PALS) Jamaica issued a statement Monday mourning the death of 13-year-old Kland Doyle, a Seaforth High School student fatally stabbed last week following what families on both sides say was a long-standing dispute that could have been resolved.
A child is dead. He was thirteen.
PALS also flagged the viral footage from Jamaica College — separate incident, similar pattern. Their assessment: “Taken together, these incidents paint an urgent and undeniable picture: Jamaica’s schools are in crisis, and punishment alone will not save our children.”
The Yard Report has nothing satirical to add to that paragraph. It is the truth, plainly stated, by people whose entire job is to save lives in classrooms. The Ministry of Education will respond eventually. The funerals are now.
HALF WAY TREE LOCK-UP: THE RATS HAVE A SCHEDULE
The Gleaner ran a story Sunday about Courtney Anderson — a man in a 31-year-old case lingering in the system since 1995 — who spent four nights on a cardboard bed in the Half Way Tree lock-up and was, in his own description, introduced to the rats that patrol the cells.
The Yard Report would like to flag the following clauses from that sentence:
- 31-year-old case
- lingering in the system
- cardboard bed
- rats that patrol the cells
Each of those clauses is, separately, a national embarrassment. Together, they are a press release the government will not write.
Half Way Tree is in Kingston. It is in the capital. It is not a remote rural facility. Yet the cells have rodent patrols on a fixed nightly schedule, and a man’s case has been pending since the year I was learning to ride a bicycle.
The Ministry of Justice has been informed. The rats, presumably, have not.
ANNOTTO BAY: PARKING, HIGGLERS, AND THE LIMITS OF MAYORAL PATIENCE
St Mary Southeast MP Christopher Brown is, per the Gleaner, in “active dialogue” with Mayor Fitzroy Wilson about Annotto Bay’s chronic parking and vending crisis.
Translation: nothing has happened, nothing is happening, and “active dialogue” is the diplomatic register for “we have been emailing.”
The town of Annotto Bay has higglers in the corridors, vehicles double-parked across entrances, and commercial activity grinding to a daily standstill. The political class has been aware of this for years. The “urgent and coordinated intervention” being requested is the same intervention requested in 2018, 2021, and 2024.
The higglers will still be there next Monday. So will the parked cars. So will the request.
SMALL VICTORY: CERVICAL CANCER SCREENING IS HITTING TARGETS
A genuinely good story, on the record. The South East Regional Health Authority’s Pap smear and HPV vaccination push — promoted heavily through April — is exceeding screening targets at multiple clinics. 20,000 HPV doses administered in 2025, 81% coverage achieved, post-Hurricane Melissa recovery on track.
Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton can take this one. The Glen Vincent Clinic pilot site is producing results. The UNICEF-SERHA partnership over the last three months is showing in the numbers.
The Yard Report does not file good news often. This one earned it.
DANTE IN PATWA: GOODISON LANDS THE EPIC
Former Poet Laureate Professor Lorna Goodison is launching her translation of Dante’s Inferno into a Jamaican-inflected English on May 6 at UWI Mona’s Main Library, hosted by the PJ Patterson Institute for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy.
A two-decade project. Already nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Already called “career-defining” and “epoch-making” by people whose job is to know the difference.
The first full-length Caribbean reimagining of Dante’s epic. The Yard Report would like to suggest that the relevant ministries find a way to put this book in every secondary school library in the country. We can debate the budget for it later. For now: Lorna Goodison has done the country a major literary favour and we should mark it.
CAVALIER MARCH ON
JPL: Defending champions Cavalier beat Racing United 2-0 at Stadium East. Kimarley Scott in the 63rd, Christopher Ainsworth penalty in the 70th. Play-offs are getting closer.
The Yard Report does not predict league outcomes. The Yard Report does observe that Cavalier are doing what champions do, which is win the games they are supposed to win.
THE BOTTOM LINE
It is Monday morning in Kingston. A man is dead in New Kingston, two men are free after fifteen wrongful years, the BOJ needs a new governor, the schools are burying children, the lock-ups have rats, Annotto Bay is gridlocked, and the cervical cancer programme is, against the odds, working.
Read it as a portrait. Hold the contradictions. Some of them are improving. Most of them aren’t.
— Yard Report. Same news, different eyes.
The Yard Report is the Jamaica voice of The Tradewinds Brief. Caribbean + Africa, for the diaspora.