BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – ORELMA PRENTICE was only 13 when she met and fell in love with Javed ‘Fathead’ Johnson of Newtown, Basseterre, a handsome 19-year-old who stood at 6’5” tall.
Eleven years later she is left to raise their three children on her own because Johnson was gunned down in the wee hours of Monday, August 16 and died later that day.
SKNVibes visited Prentice’s East Street, Newtown home that she shared with Johnson and their three children - eight year-old Jahvyann, five-year-old Kawanda and two-year-old Jah-quanna -who were at the time playing with their cousins, seemingly oblivious of the situation.
“I don’t know what to say,” said Prentice, who appeared strong while speaking about the man she loved for so many years.
“I want people to know that he wasn’t a bad person. He did things yes, but he did things for a reason; he did things to make his family happy…to make ends meet,” she said. “He wanted his kids to know that they will eat at the end of the day. We weren’t rich, we were average. He never worked; he was on the street hustling, as they’d say. I wish that guy never came and called him,” she said, directing her last sentence to the last day he was at home.
Prentice said that her boyfriend was at home and a friend came by to call him around 11:45 p.m. on Sunday, August 15, 2010.
She said shortly after Johnson left their home, the friend returned and told her to go and look for her boyfriend because there was a shooting incident and it was believed that he might have been shot.
“So I got up, put on my clothes and run down the road looking in the area he said Jahvid could have been, but I couldn’t find him. I imagined I was hearing my boyfriend moaning my name…‘Casu, Casu, Casu’. So I run down the alley (Madhouse Alley) and found him in the bushes.
“I started feeling him to see where he got the gunshot. He was face down on his belly. He told me to turn him over on his back, then I saw a lot of blood by his head and I thought he got shot in his head, but when I wiped it I saw it was a bruise. I started feeling for his phones so I can call the ambulance, but I realised he had no phone on him. Whoever shot him took his phones,” she said.
The young mother said she ran down the Alley to one of the residents and asked them to call the police and ambulance.
Prentice said she returned to tend to her boyfriend, who told her that he could not feel his hands and his body was experiencing shocks.
After they arrived at the hospital, she was informed that he was shot on the left side of his neck and the bullet might have damaged his spinal cord because he was paralysed on his left side.
“But then further on in the fore-day morning, like after 2, he couldn’t feel his legs. They told me he was paralysed for life. Most they did was hook him up on drips, and he was coughing saying he want something to drink because he was thirsty, but the nurses said he couldn’t drink anything because of his condition. He was coughing a lot, trying to get up cold…he cough and spit blood, and as fast as he did that I wiped it.
“He started telling me how much he love me, and I said, ‘Javed, you know you paralyse.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I don’t want you to suffer, I done put you through enough. I don’t want you to suffer no more by having to clean me and walking me around in a wheelchair’,” she said.
Prentice said she left the hospital around 5:00 a.m. and went home to feed her children, and on returning to the medical institution shortly before 10:00 a.m. she was told by a nurse that she could not see him because it was not visiting time.
“I told her he’s my boyfriend and I need to see him because he was shot, but she told me visiting time was at 11. I asked about his condition and I was told that he was ill. No one was giving me any information, so I went around to the back by his room and I saw him just coughing, coughing…no one was peeping on him.
“I stood there for a good half an hour watching him. When it was five minutes to 11 the door was still locked, so I went around to the back by his room and went inside. A matron came around and I told her my boyfriend asking for water all day and nobody studying him. She said she was going to find out if he can get water, and she came back with a cup of ice and said to feed him with it. After I started feeding him, you can see that he was so relieved…like it quenched his thirst; he eat them off and then I started talking to him,” she explained.
Prentice said she asked Johnson how many children he had fathered and he said six. She also asked him if he knew who he was talking to and he said, “Yeah babes, my baby, my love, my wife.”
“He fight a lot; he fight with a bullet in his chest. Every time he breathes you can see the print of the bullet pushing out of his chest. I think he could have lived though,” she said.
One of his cousins said she was told by the nurses and doctors that there was nothing they could have done, and if they had tried doing anything it might have made his condition worst.
“But how could they have made that decision for us? He was just left there,” his cousin said.
She said he passed away around 5:59 p.m.
“The nurses weren’t there, I was there. He grabbed my hands tight and froth started coming from his mouth. I thought it was normal so I ran for the napkin but he pulled my hands back and I wiped the froth from his mouth. His eyes were closed and a pool of water was in his left eye.
“The bed started stiffening. You could have heard the sheets moving on the bed. It was like he was coming up, his belly just came up high and then went back down, and he just died like that,” she said.
“The nurses announced that he died around 6:10 but I know he died at 5:59,” she added.
Prentice said they had a very loving relationship.
“We had our ups and downs. He was a street boy. People called him bad but I think he use to do a lot to maintain his family, for me and his kids. If he ain’t had it and I didn’t, he would go and take it from somebody to get it for us. He did some stuff to make ends meet, just to make me and his kids happy.
“He was loving. If me and him just had an argument he would run up behind me and hit me on me butt and whisper in my ear, or kiss me on my ear. It was hard to stay angry with him for long. It had couple times we had things real bad and one time I had a laptop and I told him I want to cherish it I don’t want it to go, and he wait til I went to work and he sold it and filled the house with foodstuff…he just tried to make the best.
“Even if things hard and he had it hard and he got something, he giving you his last, he sharing it with you. Even though he know he got it bad he sharing it with you, so you can be happy too,” Prentice said.
Prentice said that during their relationship, he had other relationships and even impregnated other women.
“But after he see I was really there for him, he decided he was going to ‘man up’ and change his life. He try change his life; much time I saw changes in him but once you hang around certain people, you can’t get out or you get out of St. Kitts,” she said.
When told that several persons claimed that prior to the shooting incident Johnson had been saying he was going to die, Prentice said she was not surprised.
“He didn’t tell me that, but people said he was saying, ‘Kill me now I want dead’. He has those kind of senses. If me and him walking going somewhere, he would say, ‘Babes, let’s walk down the next street’. I wouldn’t say he didn’t have that feeling but I never heard him say he was ready to die, because he knew I’d be scared for him.”
His other children are Jozaria, Jahvid and Javia.
Prentice said his favorite song was ‘Dem sell we out’ by Popcaan and that he was a fan of Movado.
“He would always encourage me to be strong and keep my head up, and not to let anyone tell me I can’t do anything. He used to encourage me to do anything; he encouraged me to model. I used to model but after I got my third child I stopped. One day he was like, ‘Babes you look good for a woman with three kids’,” she said.
Just days before his death, Friday, August 13, the couple went dancing at Potential Bar and they both said they would have returned there the following Friday.
SKNVibes spoke with Johnson’s son Jahvyann, who said that his father always encouraged him to be good.
“He encouraged me to go in my books when I come from school and to behave myself, and don’t be a follower but be a leader,” Jahvyann said.
The funeral service for the late Javed ‘Fathead’ Johnson will be held at Jenkins Funeral Home at 3:00 p.m. on Monday August 23.
