Monday, February 25, 2008

My first...

The first.
This weekend two employees that work at the store brother was killed. While I know this may seem slightly morbid it was a very eye opening. I should preference this with a bit of information. The two sisters whose brother was killed are really half sister to each other so one lost her full brother the other half brother. We will call the full sister Maria and half sister Jaime. Maria has only worked for the store for a few weeks while Jaime has worked for I believe a year.
So on with the story,
Saturday night around closing time the sisters get the call that there brother has been killed, but one is at home and one at the store. Maria, at the store leaves immediately, but then after we close we get a phone call asking for help because Jaime has no way to get there. We arrive at the house and half the employees are there waiting for a ride to the site. The site being where the brother was killed.
When we arrive we find the police had just taken the body out of the car and were taking it to the yard of a nearby house that had an outdoor light. Maria who is only one year younger than myself suddenly begins wailing. I have never witnessed this sort of loudness in mourning, they scream is pain, they scream in madness, the scream of cruelty, they fight for a life that was taken. I am taken aback I have only read of this and in my mind only old people did this not someone my one age, but yet I am wrong. The screaming the crying continues as the police pull things from the brothers pockets, rip his shirt and take photos of the holes that took his life.
The taxi that he has driven is taken from the ditch that it was pushed down from a steep hill above, all this in front of a crowd that looks on with lack of emotion. The police don’t put a pretty white sheet over the body they don’t put yellow tape around to mark a boundary but the do ask for people when moving the body to a car. Death is different here. They ask the family if they can take the body to the capital to take ballistics of the bullets inside the body, but the family turns it down. Whoever killed the brother did so with an unregistered gun, they have no false preferences in government justice.
The brother is taken to the house of one of the sisters. Esposo, I and another employee go and open up the store to find clothes for the brother, and coffee and soda for the mourners.
The mourners will be at the house all night long and morning too they will come and go sit around the house, in the street to be there. The family wails all night long, the brother is lying in a casket that came from nowhere and dressed in the clothes we found for him. The mother has no shoes so we give her some, the day brother died.
Brother is buried the next day, a slow stream of people walk behind the car as it creeps through the empty streets of Sunday to the cemetery.

I am told by family that brother had no enemies, the driver of the taxi he was driving and only acquired two days previous had enemies. I am told by other people he was a cocaine dealer.

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