ST.CATHERINE, JAMAICA (MURDER-SUICIDE) : Killer was overly jealous and possessive before murder-suicide...Sidney Brown shot and killed his ex-lover Verona Clarke in front their two-year-old child at a day-care . ‘Look where him go kill her, right in front of the baby’

Monday, December 21, 2015    

BY the time Sidney Brown shot and killed his ex-lover Verona Clarke in front their two-year-old child at a day-care in Linstead, St Catherine, ingredients for the murder-suicide had already been in place, given how flawed a character Brown was.

CLARKE... was shot dead by her obsessed ex in front their
 two year old son, Thursday. BROWN... killed the mother of his
child before turning the gun on himself. (Photos: Paul Henry)

By then, the 36-year-old Brown had been a rejected lover, having been kicked to the curb close to two weeks prior by the woman over whom he obsessed. He had been seething, stewing in his anger over the break-up and he spoke angrily about Clarke in public in the days leading up to the shooting.

He had been a jealous and possessive man, so much so that during their relationship he forbade Clarke, 33, from talking to other men and even policed her use of social media. When the relationship ended, she was moving on, but he had not. This was his second serious relationship to have failed, the first being his marriage.

The picture of Brown as a flawed personality was pieced together from interviews conducted Friday by the Jamaica Observer with family members and friends of Clarke’s and her co-workers at Classic Collection in Linstead. No relatives or friends of Brown’s could be reached for comment, and his wife declined to be interviewed.

Brown, a security guard and ex-member of the Jamaica Defence Force, sent shock waves throughout the community when he gunned Clarke down shortly after she arrived at the Tender Touch Learning Campus to pick up their children minutes after 6:00 pm last Thursday. The shooting sent people scampering for cover, including a Tender Touch worker who scooped up Brown’s son and dashed back inside.

He then turned the gun on himself and fell, twitching beside the woman his obsession couldn’t allow him to let go of. Clarke died leaving an 11-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.

“Look where him go kill her, right in front the crèche, right in front the baby. Him couldn’t wait till him reach out a door the way him did hot. Him just hot fi kill, true him have the likkle piece a iron, him just hot fi kill,” said Lucilda Ferguson, Clarke’s grief-stricken mother.

“You and the woman break up, but there are so many women over the whole 14 parishes; go find one next one nuh man, and just look after your child,” she lamented.  more