Dad puzzled by teen daughter’s sudden death

For approximately six hours after 16-year-old Gabrielle Simpson was found unresponsive and later pronounced dead, her father Lenroy Simpson says he had no idea she was gone.

Instead, the Gregory Park, St Catherine, father says the first word came sometime after 2 p.m. Monday, not from the police, hospital or an adult relative, but from a youngster who approached him with news he initially dismissed as a rumour.

“Mi say, ‘No sah, mi nuh hear no news. Somebody woulda call me.’ Yuh know that sound like false news, so mi seh to him say, ‘A AI man, a AI,’” Simpson recalled.

According to the Caymanas police, Gabrielle was found at approximately 8 a.m. at the Hibiscus Drive home where she had been staying. She was taken to hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Simpson said that it was only after one of his other daughters later called and asked whether anyone had contacted him that he began to suspect the youngster might have been telling the truth. His daughters eventually arrived at his home.

“Mi seh, ‘Fi tell me say Gabrielle dead?’” he recalled. “They start to cry.”

Now, as police investigate the teenager’s death and await a post-mortem, Simpson is grappling with both the loss of his daughter and the circumstances under which he learnt she had died.

“Why nobody never call me?” he asked. Gabrielle had been staying with one of her older sisters since last year, but Simpson said he remained extremely close to her.

“Gabrielle is like the breath inna me,” he said. “If she have a problem, she woulda tell me.”

That relationship has also left Simpson struggling to reconcile the circumstances related to him about the daughter he knew. Simpson acknowledged that he does not know precisely what occurred.

“I don’t know what they (the police) know because I wasn’t there to see,” he said.

While he has questions about some of the circumstances that were subsequently related to him, the father said he is prepared to accept the findings of the post-mortem.

“If the autopsy tell me say she hang, well me live wid it, but my Gabrielle woulda never do this, not my Gabrielle,” he said.

Gabrielle, his second youngest child, would have celebrated her 17th birthday in November and was expected to graduate from Ascot High School next year. Her father described her as a happy, determined teenager who looked up to her older sisters and wanted to follow in their footsteps. Simpson last saw her the Wednesday before her death. During that visit, the pair compared their heights.

“She stand up side a me and she reach me right a mi ears, and I am five foot nine,” he recalled. “She seh, ‘Daddy, mi soon taller than yuh,’ and mi seh, ‘Yuh nah taller than me.’” Five days later, it became one of his final memories of Gabrielle alive.

Her death comes during National Suicide Prevention Month. According to Jamaica Constabulary Force figures, 44 suicide cases had been recorded nationally up to September 7, compared with 38 over the corresponding period last year.

Gabrielle’s case remains under investigation, and a final determination surrounding her death has not been announced. For Simpson, the absence of answers has left his mind racing.

“Right now mi just feel numb. Mi eyes dem cya shut. Mi nuh know how me a function,” he said.

“Me a think so many things. Some good, some bad, some ugly.”