By Anesta Henry
Two children are now fatherless following the death of 28-year-old motorcyclist Ajani Emmanuel Lashley in a road accident on Wednesday evening.
Despite their young age, five-year-old Nyasia Boyce and four-year-old Nazare Lashley are aware how the man they called “Daddy” met his death.
When a Barbados TODAY team visited Lashley’s Passage Road, St Michael home, the two lamented that their father was “dead because he got hit by a car”.
“My daddy told me he was going to get his motorcycle fixed. My daddy love me. He used to get what I want for my school,” Boyce told Barbados TODAY as she watched her brother eat his breakfast.
According to a police report, Lashley was riding his motorcycle along Fontabelle Road, St Michael, around 6:35 p.m., when it was involved in a collision with a car.
His aunt, Betty Lashley, who raised the former St Mary’s Primary and Daryll Jordan Secondary student from the age of six years old when his father Carl Lashley was killed, recalled that she received the news about the tragedy from another relative.
“The last thing he told me is that he coming back. He said he was going to get something do and he was coming back. I told him then that I might have to leave home so he said that he coming back.
“He got where he went, and on his way back up, that was it. So it was like, say between half hour to 45 minutes everything happened. It was very quick. It is very hurtful and something you know you didn’t expect and you can’t really accept right now,” she said.
The aunt said that even though the family was in the midst of grieving, their main priority at this time would be to protect and comfort his children whom he loved very much.
“This morning they started the conversation about their dad and I just tried to soften it up a little bit so that they wouldn’t cry and things like that. The little boy was like ‘who hit my daddy?’ I told him it was an accident’.
“And she [Nyasia] said, ‘well you know, Auntie Betty, we have to bury my dad and I have to walk up with the casket’. And I told her ‘it is okay, whatever you want to do on that day, even with arrangements, we will include you’,” she said.
“I trying to be strong, especially for them, because if they see me crying they are going to do the same and I don’t want that. It is very sad.”
Lashley said that while her nephew was far from perfect, she admired the care and affection he had for his offspring.
She added that he was fun-loving and liked to go out and dress up.
“Everybody would have their challenges sometimes but he was okay, and I made sure that I look after those children as well for him when he is not here. Now I have to be 100 per cent there where they are concerned because right now it is all about these children.
“Yes, I know we have to look to make arrangements for him, but it is all about these children right now. But they are going to be alright. They have their mother and they are normally with her from Fridays to Sundays,” the aunt said.
Lashley said it was a difficult experience having to identify her nephew’s body, 24 years after having to do the same for his father who was fatally shot in Westbury Road in 1999.
“But God knows best. We can only accept what happened last night, but we can’t move on yet because we now have to try and cope and get some more information,” she said, explaining that she was still unsure about the circumstances of the fatal accident.
The deceased would have celebrated his 29th birthday on Valentine’s Day, February 14. anestahenry@barbadostoday.bb
