By Elvin Carl Croker

A grieving mother of Sophia said she is pleading for youths to show more love for one another. Her cry comes in the wake of the brutal stabbing to death of her 24-year-old son recently.

The distraught mother said she was happy when his father took him to the USA four years ago because she was not pleased with the type of company he was keeping in Sophia at the time.

However, looking at the turn of events now she said she now regrets sending him and said it would have been better if he had stayed under the protection of her wings and where she would have struggled with him until things got better.

Relating what was relayed to her on the incident, which occurred in the USA, she said she got a call that her son Kennan Orson Michael Paul was stabbed by his cousin Denzil Dexter Cummings.

“And when he finish stabbing him he called [Paul’s] father and said ‘Uncle Jomo, me and Kennan just had an argument an I stab he, call him and see if he ok’ that is all I hear,” she said.

She said while the stabbing happened at 10:50 hrs on July 17, she only got the message around 17:00hrs the said day.
The mother who is currently employed as a part-time staff in the GECOM House to House registration process said her son’s remains are expected in the country on August 1 and will be buried on August 5.
She related that her son was staying at his aunt’s house – Cummings’mother- but said that they have a very good relationship.

“When he first went to the States he attended college before securing a job, I don’t know what transpired with them because they grew up like brothers. There was an argument but what they were arguing about nobody knows,” she related.

While this incident occurred abroad, it can serve as a wakeup call to put in place systems to deal with such situations which might be brewing. Only recently a non-governmental organisation (NGO), the ‘Give Another Chance Foundation’ said it wants to petition the government of Guyana to have ‘social-emotional learning’ taught in schools in Guyana.
This, the NGO says, will help to reduce cases like these and other cases that can lead to suicide and other mental health problems at a young age.

The foundation said its recently held “Mindfulness and emotional Intelligence” workshop which targeted teachers and social workers, seeks to train persons how to impart to their students at an early age, skills on how to deal with their emotions and show empathy to others so that later in life the children they teach would be able to deal adequately with depression, anxiety and thus know how to resolve conflict.

Founder of the NGO, Miranda Thakur-Deen related that with the success of such a petition person both young and old will develop the art of being more aware of oneself and understanding oneself. “If you don’t understand you, you can’t understand somebody else,” she said.

She pointed out that mindfulness and emotional intelligence involve being aware of yourself, being present in the moment and understanding your every emotion and thought.
News of Kennan Paul’s death created a stir on social and other media outlets. According to a news release, Kennan Orson Michael Paul took his last breath on July 17 when his cousin Denzil Dexter Cummings allegedly dealt him four stabs about his body outside of a construction site at Lake Street in Ithaca, New York.

According to reports from the Ithaca Police Department in New York, they were both working as laborers at a construction company in the City of Ithaca when Paul was found lying in a pool of blood outside the apartment building at the construction site of the company about 10:50 hrs and was transported to the Cayuga Medical Centre where he died.

His brother , Jomo Brusheildon Paul, a former journalist, who worked for many years in Georgetown Guyana, also currently lives in New York.
Since the incident, Denzil Dexter Cummings has not been found and is said to be on the run.