By Nagra Plunkett, Staff ReporterWESTERN BUREAU:
A DOUBLE murder in Cambridge, St. James, is baffling the police and has got reactions of shock from the community at what seems to be the senseless killing of a young couple at their home.
Investigators say they have no motive for the killings of driver Devon 'Nash' Allen, 29, and his wife, Karlene Hayles-Allen, a 25-year-old second year student at Sam Sharpe Teachers' College in Montego Bay.
Scores of residents and family members converged at the couple's home in Bullman, Cambridge, as they grappled with the tragedy that had unfolded in their community.
The Allens' bodies were found in their unfinished house at about 7:00 a.m. by relatives. The husband's face was bashed in and he had a gunshot wound to the back of his head. His wife's throat was slashed. They had been married for six years and had a six-year-old daughter.
"I'm not feeling well at all. I didn't expect anything like this," said Karlene's mother, Jacinth Hayles. "They were very quiet people, I don't know of any reason why someone would want to kill them."
TERRIBLE DISCOVERY
Mrs. Hayles said she last spoke to her daughter on Monday night, when Karlene was at the Cornwall Regional Hospital with her husband, who had complained of feeling ill earlier that day. "I called her on her phone this morning and then Devon's, but I couldn't get through," she told The Gleaner.
"I called Devon's father and someone went to check for them. Later I got the news that Devon was dead. Alvin, Karlene's father, was asking for our daughter and he went to the house and found her body."
The couple's house was ransacked and the husband's Toyota Camry motor car was stolen along with their cellular phones. The car was later found burnt and abandoned in bushes along the roadway between Wales Pond and Ramble Hill in St. James, about 15 miles from Cambridge.
Some of the Allens' neighbours with whom The Gleaner spoke said they had heard noise over the Allens' house but thought that nothing was amiss.
"I hear a banging on a door over there about one, two o'clock but I didn't think nothing of it. I didn't hear any gunshot," an elderly man said. "I went back to sleep and go to bush (farm) this morning because nothing didn't seem strange over there. Mi so frighten when me hear what happened."
Another woman reportedly heard an explosion sometime after 2:00 a.m. She said when she peered through a window she saw Mr. Allen's car leaving, and assumed everything was alright.
The murders have pushed the parish's tally to 95 since the start of the year.
