IN JAMAICA (ALARMING MURDER RATE) : Tough day at Charlemont High.... Wife, students grieve for humble,caring maths teacher

BY TANESHA MUNDLE Observer staff reporter mundlet@jamaicaobserver.com  Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Last Friday night when Sherine Perry-Howell realised that her husband had not returned home for the first time in their 10 years of marriage, her worst fear was that he had been robbed of his vehicle and was left abandoned somewhere.

Tara Wright clings to her classmate for support as they both mourn the loss of their
 Charlemont High School teacher, Tanijah Howell, who was murdered
last weekend. His body was found in St Ann with gunshot wounds.
 (Photo: Joseph Wellington)

Despite the wave of deadly violence across the country, Perry-Howell admitted that she never thought her husband, Tanijah Howell, 39-year-old maths teacher at Charlemont High School, would have been found dead.

“I thought that something bad had happened because he never stayed out late, or gone anywhere and has never come home, but I really did not think it was this bad. I thought that it could be a case where they took away his car and left him abandoned in an unknown location,” the grieving wife told the Jamaica Observer at the school yesterday.

Howell’s body was found last Saturday morning in bushes in Barrett Hall, St Ann with two gunshot wounds. Perry-Howell, who was accompanied to the school by her two children — eight-year-old Tahj and six-year-old Shalini, who were seemingly oblivious to the grief around them — had reported her husband missing on Saturday morning around 8:00. An hour later she got the devastating news of his untimely demise.

“So I am speculating that the time when I was making the report, that was when they found him. And, like any person who gets a message like that, I was shocked. I cried, I screamed,” said Perry-Howell, who explained that she was not aware of her husband planning to visit St Ann, neither did she know of any other plan he had for Friday evening.

“He went to work, took the kids to school, picked them up in the evening. He took Tahj to the barber, they ate, and then he left them with my church sister,” she recalled.

Perry-Howell described her husband as “humble, jovial, loyal to his job, his children, and to his family, and very hard-working”.

His caring nature, she said, is what she will miss most.

“It is not easy, and you have me at one of the good moments; but it’s rough, it’s tough, and his death has sunk it, but I have two small kids so I have to be strong for them,” she added.

Initially, the mood at the school was light as Howell’s students laughed and reminisced about the maths teacher’s life. more