Gareth Manning, Staff Reporter

EVERY TIME 24-year-old Afrika-Courtney James hears that a person in her age group has been killed, her thoughts immediately flash back to two close friends: Marvin Smith and Jhanel Whyte.

They died a month apart at the hands of bloodthirsty gunmen.

Smith, a 25-year-old young man fighting against the odds to get a good education, was robbed and shot dead by gunmen close to his home on Tavern Drive, St Andrew, in December of 2007. Smith knew his attacker, it was said, and some people believe jealousy could have been the motive for the murder of the final-year history major.

Whyte, an employee at the National Housing Trust and her boyfriend, Taiwo McKenzie, were kidnapped and killed a month earlier in November of 2007 after they went to a location in Havendale to give medical supplies to a man they had accidentally hit from a motorcycle.

Traumatic effect

They were kidnapped and a ransom of US$100,000 demanded by their kidnappers. When the demand was not met, the criminals slashed the young couple's throats and left the bodies to rot in bushes in Mount Salus, Red Hills, St Andrew.

"It's almost like every year, somebody who I grew up with dies," James says. The events have had such a traumatic effect on her that visitors to her MySpace page on the Internet would notice an album dedicated to all the friends she has lost over the last four years.

"Every time a look at (pictures of Marvin) I just reflect on my childhood and I just can't believe," the outspoken university student says.

James sometimes still calls her childhood friend on his cellular phone and listens as it rings and rings until his voicemail plays.

"It's so weird. The phone just rings and then you hear the person's voicemail. It kind a keeps you close to them," she says.

The community of Tavern where Smith grew up was not always barking with guns, James remembers. But it was always poor and surrounded by other marginalised communities, such as Kintyre, Hope Flats and August Town, which is just southeast of Tavern. Over time, like many of Jamaica's lower-class communities, guns eventually became bibles.

To James, what has happened to Tavern and to Jamaica at large has been a massive erosion of morals.

"I think is just morals. My grandmother lived in Tavern and I used to visit there regularly," she says. "Now, is like every other day you hear gunshots," she adds.

The eroded morals, she believes, was also what led to the murder of Whyte, a graduate fresh from the University of the West Indies.

"When my mummy told me she was missing, I started crying immediately because I knew whatever happened, a girl like her never deserved whatever they were going to do to her," she says.

Friendship

James met Whyte one summer, when they were teenagers, on a summer job at the Development Bank of Jamaica. Almost immediately, the two struck up a friendship.

"She was just soft-spoken and slow and quiet in nature. Jhanel just never seemed to have a bad day. She was so good and she and her boyfriend were willing to help these men even when they were warned about going there," James recounts.

Looking into her life, James, who is now in her final year of university, counts her blessings for making it this far.

"It's like so many of childhood friends have either moved out or have died," she says as she remembers friends who are part of the 'lost generation'.