Cathy Nurse watched in horror as her 27-year-old son Anthony Nurse’s life was cut short in a brutal stabbing attack by another resident with a scissors, close to his home at Stratford Hill, The Pine, yesterday evening.
Nurse told Barbados TODAY that seeing her son staggering away and falling on a nearby well, clutching to his wounds, was a sight that will stay with her forever.
Twenty-seven-year-old Anthony Nurse died from stab wounds on Monday evening.
Karen Nurse looking at the well where her nephew fell holding his stab wounds before being rushed to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
Cradling her head as she sat at her dining table, a grieving Nurse cried out that she was still in disbelief that the father of a three-month-old daughter died senselessly.
Nurse, the fourth of her six children, was the type of child a mother could wish for, she said.
Around 5:45 p.m., police responded to reports of a stabbing incident at Stratford Hill. But when they arrived on the scene, they learned that the victim had been taken to hospital by car. He later succumbed to his injuries.
A man is assisting lawmen with investigations, police said.
Nurse told Barbados TODAY: “He was just standing up because it was children fighting and his sister was involved. And the girls’ brother had big rocks like he want to hit my daughter or something so, and I had to go and block he off.
Anthony Nurse’s grieving relatives and friends, including (from left) his mother Cathy Nurse, aunt Karen Nurse, sister Akea Nurse-Waithe, and best friend Shanice Thomas.
“And then he uncle run up to my son and stab he up. But all the time I thought he was cuffing him, but he was stabbing him. Got me ain’t got no son now. I had six, but I got five children now. He was the fourth child.”
Minutes before the incident, Nurse and his mother were sitting in their living room chatting as they watched television.
She said that her son who placed his all into planning his outfits, helped others in the neighbourhood where he was affectionately known as Unga, and enjoyed riding motorcycles, did not deserve to die this way.
“He was a good son. Nobody ain’t going to say nothing bad about he. And if he wasn’t a nice boy I wouldn’t say he was a nice boy. But he was a very nice boy. He was a loving child. He now get a baby. That baby was his world.
“The only thing he would focus on is that little girl. He would go to sleep with she on his mind. He would call she before he go to sleep and when she sleeping he still want to see she,” She told Barbados TODAY.
Anthony Nurse’s best friend, Shanice Thomas, who visited the home to offer his mother comfort, said her “forever friend” who loved life was very good at avoiding conflict.
She could not help but wonder what went wrong that evening, she said.
“He would mix with people, go outside, and he would talk. He would ride his bike. But he wouldn’t get into trouble. He would work. He raised a little girl before his daughter and he was the best dad to her. This is so hurtful. But he died peacefully. When I went and saw him it was just like he sleeping.”
Aunt Rose King stressed that while relatives and friends often describe young men who die violently as good boys, no one would object to characterising her nephew as “a good boy”.
It was a description that was shared by all of the residents in Nurse’s neighbourhood who spoke to Barbados TODAY about a young man who stayed out of trouble.
Many were so shocked and saddened at his death that they said they found it difficult to go about their daily activities.
Said one resident: “He was a gem. I vex about it because I don’t think it should have gone all the way there. You family and my family fighting that is nonsense. He was on the ground when he was getting stabbed. He get up and he run. I keep asking everybody if “Unga” dead, because I still can’t believe it.”
Another resident added: “He was a very nice fella. That man take my nephew from me. He was not a troublesome person. If he see two ants he would walk far away from them and go long, he ain’t gine mash them ants. You could go at any house out here and they would tell you the same thing, he was a nice boy. And if I say so it is true, because I is one woman who does call a spade a spade.”
Shopkeeper Rhonda Hollingsworth recalled that Nurse was often the one to get confrontations under control, before “a fight even break out”.
“He would be the one to say that ain’t call for, wunna is youngsters growing up. And, he is a person if you have a noise with him, he is going to go on the other side of the road and he is going to pass you straight.
“I am a mother of seven and I don’t feel good. I don’t believe that he deserved to die like that. Justice must be served because he is not a troublesome person. If a old person in the neighbourhood call him to do something, he would go and do it,” Hollingsworth said.
One young man in the community said many days Nurse gave him something to eat when he was hungry.
“You know how some people would throw that back in your face; not he. He would go in his mother’s kitchen and get something for me to eat,” the man said.
