A father’s agony

“WHERE IS MY SON’S BODY!”

That was the anguished cry of Jeffrey Odle, the distraught father of Kemo Grant, who died under mysterious circumstances while in police custody in June 2024.

Odle visited The Nation recently to plead for information regarding his son’s body, which he found out was no longer at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s (QEH) morgue.

“I went to the morgue three weeks ago and told them I came about my son’s body. They told me he isn’t there; that the body was only there for an autopsy and it is gone,” he recounted.

He returned yesterday and rang the bell at the morgue, only to be told again that his son was not there. He was advised to check with Paramount Funeral Home or the police.

No information

“I really would like to know where my son is. I really would like to bury my son,” Odle said.

“To this day, I haven’t gotten a cause of death, no autopsy report, no information about my son and I would like some help – the public or somebody – to tell me where he is at.”

Odle’s stepdaughter Tricia Grant said she telephoned Paramount Funeral Home on Monday but was told it could not provide any information and she was directed to contact the police.

However, Shane Sealy, communications specialist at the QEH, offered a different account when contacted yesterday. He told The Nation the body had not been at their morgue since earlier this year and was currently located at Lyndhurst Funeral Home.

“According to officials at Lyndhurst, it is a police body,” Sealy stated.

Grant, 29, was arrested by police on June 8, 2024, at Eagle Hall, St Michael. He was found unresponsive in the prisoners’ cells at the Central Police Station in Bridgetown on June 9, 2024. Police reported at the time that an ambulance was summoned but none was available. Grant was subsequently pronounced dead at the scene by a doctor.

Fighting back tears, Odle said he was never informed that his son’s body had been moved from the QEH morgue and remained in the dark about its location.

When contacted, the family’s attorney, Tyra Trotman, who is also the St Michael Central Member of Parliament, indicated she was unaware the body had been moved. She raised concerns about the logistics of the situation.

“In any case, the family should have the body for burial, but who is responsible for the storage fees at the funeral home, since it was not the family who took the body there?” she asked.

The family had previously launched a civil case challenging a coroner’s order to have a general pathologist examine the body instead of a forensic pathologist. Trotman said the application was dismissed, with the judge ruling that the post-mortem be performed by a medical practitioner prescribed under the Coroner’s Act.

Legal fight

“The matter was decided not in favour of us. So at the time, the option was to get an appeal if they wanted, but of course, that would have involved legal fees,” the attorney said.

She noted that Grant’s sister, Tricia, who had been funding the legal fight, found it difficult to proceed further, effectively ending the challenge.

“The reason why we had requested the toxicology report is because the police were saying that he died basically because he overdosed – he ingested a toxic substance,” Trotman said.

“We wanted to make sure we got a toxicology report done so that they can’t say that it was because of that, because he also had a gash to his head.

“What we had speculated, but we can’t prove it, was that he actually died from internal bleeding from a blow to his head . . . .”

A grieving Grant lamented that she was forced to abandon the legal battle due to a lack of funds.

“If I could win the lottery, I would fight this to the end,” she said, as she reflected on the uncertainty surrounding her brother’s cause of death and the current location 0f his remains.

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