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Eventide Fire

The Eventide Home For The Aged was opened on 1st July 1870 on Slipe Pen Road, Kingston, Jamaica. Funded by the Kingston & Saint Andrews Corporation (K.S.A.C.), for its first year of operation Eventide housed approximately 160 old women. Its service was later expanded to provide care and accommodation to destitute, mentally and physically handicapped old men, and to children of both sexes. By 1980, Eventide’s population had risen to some 700 residents, 211 of whom (all elderly women) resided in Myers ward. The staff at the time numbered 180 and was led by Mr. David E. Dunkley, Master of the Home.

A basic wood structure of pitch-pine erected at the end of the nineteenth century and long fallen into neglect, Myers Ward was quickly consumed and then completely destroyed by a fire that broke out in the early hours of Tuesday, 20th May 1980. A joint team of firefighters from Kingston and the neighbouring Parish of Saint Andrew managed to prevent the conflagration from spreading to the rest of the Home.

Of the 211 elderly women housed in Myers Ward, only 58 managed to escape that morning with their lives. 144 charred bodies were recovered from the ashes and rubble. Two victims died of their burns at Kingston Public Hospital over the following days, and a further seven missing women were assumed as additional casualties.

What was recovered of the dead at the site was placed inside 26 coffins and laid to rest in a mass grave inside National Heroes Park on May 26th 1980. This date was declared a day of national morning by Prime Minister Michael Manley. The operators of the home, K.S.A.C., estimated the financial loss of the fire in the region of J$150,000.

Although a coroner’s jury declared after 17 minutes of deliberation on May 5, 1981 that nobody should be held criminally accountable for the tragedy, many people believe the fire was deliberately started as an act of political terrorism, occurring as it did in the months preceding the most violently contested general election in Jamaican history. The evidence towards arson is strong. A number of the Home’s residents had previously submitted reports to the police of gunmen entering the premises uninvited on several occasions and declaring their intent to murder both staff members and inmates for their presumed political affiliation. What’s more, six months on from the fire, gunmen besieged the surviving parts of the Home and seriously injured two persons. The first victim, Mr. Harold Tefler, a meal van delivery driver, was stabbed and beaten in the process of unloading. The second victim, Miss Vera Wynter, a 63-year-old female resident, was shot several times when gunmen opened fire on her whilst she stood on an outside veranda.