KINGSTON, Jamaica — A home is supposed to be where the world stops at the gate. It is where a mother closes the door at night, where children learn their first words, where homework is done at the table, meals are shared, prayers are whispered and tomorrow is planned. For 25 year old Orneilia “Nana” Walker, home was where she spent much of her final Sunday. Reports say Walker had been inside her Hibiscus Avenue home in Tower Hill, St Andrew, tutoring her four and five year old children while her younger children, aged one and three, stayed close. Later, she stepped outside and sat near her gate. Minutes later, she was shot repeatedly. Police were called after residents heard explosions shortly after 7 p.m. Walker was taken to Kingston Public Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. A gunman reportedly escaped in a waiting motor car.
Think about that for a moment. She had not travelled to some distant dangerous place. She was not somewhere her family expected danger. She was at the boundary of her own home. That makes this more than another crime story. It asks a deeply Jamaican question and an even older biblical one: Who is my neighbour?
In Luke 10, Jesus tells of a man attacked by criminals, stripped, wounded and left beside the road. A priest saw him and continued walking. A Levite saw him and did the same. Then came the Samaritan, the person least expected to help, and Scripture says simply that “he had compassion on him.” Jesus changed the question. The issue was no longer, “Which people qualify as my neighbours?” It became, “Am I behaving like a neighbour?” That distinction matters in Jamaica today.
It is easy to condemn a killer after another mother has fallen. It is more uncomfortable to ask what happens before the trigger is pulled. Who knows where the guns are? Who knows which young man has suddenly acquired one? Who hears threats and says nothing? Who sees a family becoming frightened and decides it is none of their business? Who has become so accustomed to death that another murder is discussed for five minutes and forgotten by lunchtime? The priest and the Levite did not attack the injured man. They simply passed him. Sometimes a society does the same.
Walker’s mother, Shonie Goodison, described her daughter as jovial, friendly and loved by people around her. Residents said the killing shocked a community where shootings had not recently been commonplace. That detail matters because Jamaicans often imagine violent crime as something confined to somebody else’s district, somebody else’s street or somebody else’s family. Then violence crosses another road, enters another community and reaches another home.
The Prime Minister visited Walker’s family on October 2 and acknowledged that the State had failed to deter those responsible for her killing. He pledged that the perpetrators would be pursued and said the law against illegal firearms would be strengthened while also being refined so innocent people are not unfairly caught by it. That intervention came during an important national debate over Jamaica’s Firearms Act. Members of the legal profession have raised concerns about mandatory minimum sentences and judicial discretion, while the Government has maintained that tough sanctions remain necessary in the fight against illegal firearms. There is no contradiction in wanting both things. A country can insist that people who deliberately arm themselves to terrorise communities face serious consequences while also insisting that justice distinguishes the guilty from the innocent. Justice without strength can fail victims. Strength without justice can create new ones. The Bible demands neither indifference nor vengeance. Micah 6:8 calls people “to do justly, and to love mercy.” Both.
Jamaica should also acknowledge progress where it exists. Jamaica Constabulary Force figures showed 392 murders between January 1 and September 26, 2026, compared with 515 over the corresponding period in 2025, a reduction of about 24 per cent. Shootings were also down. Earlier this year, the Police Commissioner reported that May recorded only 39 murders, the lowest May figure in more than three decades. These are significant developments, but statistics describe a country. They do not describe grief. To the statistician, a murder becomes part of a monthly total. To four children, the number is one mother. To Shonie Goodison, it is one daughter. Falling crime therefore cannot mean falling concern.
The Christian response cannot simply be, “At least things are getting better.” The Good Samaritan did not calculate whether the road from Jerusalem to Jericho had become statistically safer before deciding whether the wounded man deserved help. He saw somebody bleeding and stopped.
Christianity has profoundly shaped Jamaican family life, education, community organisation and ideas about morality, although our history should never be romanticised. Christian institutions existed within colonial Jamaica and some accommodated or justified slavery. Other Christian movements became important spaces for education, organisation and resistance. That contradiction is part of our story. So too is Samuel Sharpe, an enslaved Baptist deacon whose religious leadership helped organise resistance during the 1831 Christmas Rebellion and contributed to the movement towards emancipation. Paul Bogle was also a Baptist deacon. Faith in Jamaica has therefore been more than Sunday clothes and church walls. At some of the decisive moments in our national history, faith asked whether injustice should simply be accepted because people had become accustomed to it.
That same question faces us now.
At Jamaica Homes, much of the conversation naturally centres on property. Prices, mortgages, land, titles, construction and investment all matter. But perhaps moments like this force us to remember what all of that is ultimately for. A house has financial value. A home has human value. People work for years to build one. Parents sacrifice to acquire one. Some leave Jamaica and work abroad, sending money home brick by brick. Others take long mortgages, add rooms gradually, repair roofs, plant trees, build walls and create something they hope will protect the people they love.
Psalm 127 begins: “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.” That passage has always meant more than concrete. A society has failed if a family can build the walls but cannot reasonably expect safety within them. Locks can secure a door. Grilles can secure a window. A wall can surround a yard. But none of those things alone can build a safe country. That requires neighbours.
Long before Jesus told the story of the Samaritan, another man was questioned after violence. God asked Cain where his brother Abel was. Cain replied: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Human history has spent thousands of years trying to answer that question without accepting the responsibility contained inside it. Scripture’s answer is uncomfortable. Yes. Not his owner. Not his controller. But his keeper in the sense that his life cannot become completely irrelevant to yours.
That does not mean ordinary Jamaicans should confront armed criminals. It means communities giving information safely to the authorities. It means parents challenging behaviour before it becomes criminality, churches being present outside their sanctuaries, men correcting other men, schools recognising when children are being pulled towards gangs and citizens refusing to shelter killers simply because they are somebody’s nephew, cousin, friend or “good youth”. Silence can become an ecosystem in which evil grows.
Jamaica does not need to return to some imaginary past in which everybody behaved perfectly. That Jamaica never existed. What we can recover are principles: neighbourliness, responsibility, respect for life, courage, family, justice and compassion. The idea that another person’s child matters. The idea that somebody else’s mother matters. The understanding that what happens three streets away may eventually reach your street if everybody keeps walking past on the other side.
Jesus ended the parable by asking which man had been the neighbour. The answer was the one who showed mercy. Then came three words which remain remarkably difficult: “Go, and do likewise.”
Orneilia Walker should have been able to sit at her gate. Her children should have been able to expect their mother to come back inside. No legislation alone can restore what they have lost. No sermon can. No politician can. But laws, policing, courts, churches, families, schools, communities and individual Jamaicans can each answer the question placed before us.
Who is my neighbour?
The child next door. The mother at the gate. The stranger on the roadside. The frightened family we know nothing about. And perhaps Jamaica gets further down the right road when we stop asking whether their suffering concerns us and start asking what kind of neighbour we intend to be.
Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomesnews Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com
Visit our YouTube Community ↗