Father killed one week after son’s funeral

One week ago, Tristan Parkes stood over the grave of his two-year-old son, who perished in a house fire in White Hall, St Andrew.

On Thursday night, the 28-year-old father was dead, fatally wounded during a dispute over a bath pan with a cousin he had grown up alongside.

“[I] can’t believe it reach to this,” Tristan’s father, Perry Parkes, told THE STAR. “There is so much loss in the family -- one after the other.”

The death of Tristan has jolted him at the core. Tristan Parkes and his 24-year-old cousin were raised under the same roof at Donmair Close, Kingston 19, like brothers.

The 24-year-old is the son of Perry’s sister. Perry said his nephew remained with him after his mother moved away when the boys were younger.

“She moved years ago when they were younger. She seh him seh to her him wanna stay here and me will govern him... . and I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll take care of him’,” Perry recalled.

From then, Perry said there was little distinction between two biological sons and his nephew.

“Every weh me a go, me bring the three a dem,” he said. “It come een like a me three son dem. Mi nuh leave them in a situation where them affi go beg nobody or take nobody things.”

Perry said the cousins were not strangers to the occasional clash, having had their share of arguments while growing up together. But the disagreements were, in his view, the ordinary friction.

“They always have their little arguments, little moments now and then. Them a human beings; we ago have a little fuss. Mouth, teeth and tongue meet,” he said.

However, nothing he had witnessed before prepared him for the violence that unfolded on Thursday.

“Me caah wrap me head around this,” he said. “Where this really come from?”

For Parkes, the nightmare began with the sound of his dog barking. He was asleep upstairs at his Kingston 19 home when his poodle began making repeated, frantic noises.

Perry believes Tristan had been trying to get his attention so that he could intervene in the disagreement.

“Like him did come fi shout me fi tell my nephew fi say fi lowe him things or whatever them a quarrel over, but all these times me not even know weh gwaan,” he said.

By the time Perry came downstairs, the violence had already taken a deadly turn.

Tristan walked out of the yard and made it about 100 metres before collapsing.

His father and brother rushed to him to the hospital

Perry watched medical personnel work on his son, desperately trying to keep him alive.

“I stood there and watch the whole thing, how they are trying to help him,” he said.

After about two hours, a doctor delivered the devastating news: Tristan did not make it.

For Perry, the loss is almost impossible to absorb. He remembers his son as a hardworking young man who wanted more from life.

“Hardworking yute. Is a yute weh ever on the go, say he wants to get rich and get out a this place. That a him story every day, say him a try, him a try do everything to make life work,” the distraught father said.