Twenty-three years after 12-year-old Rasheeda Bascombe told her sister “I coming back” and never did, her grandfather Winfield Nurse was found guilty of disposing of her body by a jury in the No. 4A Supreme Court yesterday.
He was remanded to Dodds Prison until next year when a pre-sentencing report is due.
Nurse, 80, of Accommodation Road, Bush Hall, St Michael, had denied unlawfully disposing of his 12-year-old granddaughter’s body, between January 2, 2002, and May 30, 2013.
He was represented by attorney Lennox Miller, while Principal State Counsel Olivia Davis, State Counsel Tito Holder and State Counsel Anastacia McMeo-Boyce prosecuted.
Yesterday, the jury took about an hour and 25 minutes to return a unanimous guilty verdict.
Justice Donna Babb-Agard then ordered a pre-sentencing report and sent the now convicted man back to Dodds, where he had been on remand since 2020 because he could not find a surety.
Nurse will return to court on January 29, next year.
During the trial, the court had heard from a neighbour, who was at Nurse’s house on January 2, 2002, that Rasheeda was in the dining room on the phone when she told her sister Raquel: “I coming back”.
That neighbour said that was the last time he heard or saw the girl.
The police statement of the girl’s mother, Hermena Straker, who is deceased and which was read into evidence, revealed that her daughter Rasheeda was living with her [Straker’s] father [Nurse] and grandmother at Accommodation Road after her daughter had “come out of the Nightengale Home”. She was a student at the Parkinson School.
The woman’s first statement detailed how she spent many days travelling back and forth between the house at Accommodation Road and District “A” Station.
Straker’s statement said people “were saying they were seeing [Rasheeda] all over the place”.
Her statement said she remembered “one Sunday”, after she had again visited District “A” Station, she went to her father’s house and he requested “a picture of Rasheeda to put up in his bedroom”.
In the woman’s second statement to police, which was dictated on June 1, 2013, she said her father confessed to her he had stabbed Rasheeda and left her for dead.
“I sat in the chair in front of him and I questioned him as to where Rasheeda was. My father told me that Rasheeda was dead. Being torn up in pain, I started crying and I asked him, how you mean she’s dead?” the court heard.
“Then he said to me that Rasheeda had asked him for money and she took out a knife and pointed [it] at him, and the two of them started to scuffle, which caused them to tumble to the ground, and Rasheeda got juck with knife in her belly and she hit her head.
“My father also told me he left her body there in Jackson. My father did not specify the exact location in Jackson that he left her.
“I also asked my father why he did not go to the police, but he just stared at me. He did not answer. When my father told me what happened to Rasheeda, it was just both of us in a room. No one else was there with us,” the statement ended.
Nurse opted to say nothing in his defence.
