Almost two years after the disappearance of their daughter, Wayne Peters and Pearl Narine refuse to believe Jade is dead.
The parents spoke openly, smiled and joked during the interview. It was only after it had ended and the mother walked away from her husband to take me through the wooden gate that tears began streaming down her face. She held on to me in a tight embrace.
“I hope she is not out there suffering. I see her face every morning coming down the stairs,” she said in tears.
Jade was a Form One student at the Union Claxton Bay Secondary School. She was 12 when she disappeared. A young girl with a promising future, Jade was the last of four children. She turned 14 on March 15.
“We are always looking out for good news. Death is the last thing on our mind. We are looking out to hear her voice one day or hear somebody say she in Venezuela or something,” said Peters.
On December 26, 2014, around 10 pm, Jade told a relative she was leaving home to get a phone card at a nearby shop but never returned. Alarm bells rang the next day when the relative alerted family that Jade had not returned. Her parents thought she was asleep downstairs in the house with the female relative. They believed she was lured to leave the house that night.
They denied reports that the 12-year-old ran away with an older man or was seen in various parts of the country.
“That is just talk.”
Last week, the family sank into sadness after the remains of a female body were found in the Morne Diablo forest. There were reports that a tattoo was still visible on the corpse’s foot. The parents said Jade has a small bow on her left calf.
On Friday, Peters told the Sunday Guardian he had received a telephone call from an officer attached to the Anti-Kidnapping Squad who questioned him about his daughter’s case. The officer, he said, told him there were four bodies at Forensic that were unidentified and asked him if he would be available yesterday to view the bodies, one of which was the body found last week.
But contacted yesterday, Peters said no one called. It was not the first time they were called to identify a body.
The first time, before they even made it to Port-of-Spain, the body had already been identified by another family.
He said his wife had sleepless nights since the police discovered the body on Thursday, but they have faith that Jade is alive.
Narine said her gut feeling was “that she eh dead.”
She thinks her daughter will show up in front of the family’s Dow Village, California, home and say, “Mummy, I’m home.”
Just before she started secondary school, Jade was diagnosed with narcolepsy. Narcolepsy is a neurological disorder that affects the control of sleep and wakefulness. People with narcolepsy experience excessive daytime sleepiness and intermittent, uncontrollable episodes of falling asleep during the daytime. Narine said she was frequently called in by school officials to answer questions about Jade “always falling asleep in class.”
She had been receiving treatment up to the time she went missing.
Peters said when South hairdresser Ria Sookdeo was kidnapped, it “was like a whole nightmare for me.” He said he knew how Sookdeo’s family was feeling since he had been going through that distressing experience for about two years.
“Nights upon nights I went from police station to police station, checking hospitals, nursing homes, and going all over the place.”
Christmas and birthdays are never the same. They are now sombre occasions. Peters said he keeps his head down whenever he passes billboards with the faces of missing people.
“I pass her room straight when I see the door open,” he said.
The parents lambasted the police saying there was little co-operation and they were hesitant to talk about details of the case for safety reasons. Days after Jade went missing, the family home was shot at six times.
Narine said, “We always watch the news and see people go missing and to actually face it now...everybody sees us walking and think we gone ahead with life, but people see your face and not your heart.”
n If you have any information on the whereabouts of any missing person, please contact the TTPS or Crime Stoppers at 800-TIPS.