Kay Osborne noticed the first sign of something unusual about David less than two weeks after she brought the six-year-old back from Jamaica to live with her in Highland Park. “One evening after his bath I was lying next to him on his bed reading to him. All of a sudden he picked up my free hand, placed it on his genitals, and squeezed his legs together,” she says. “I was startled and removed my hand. Then he did it again. I wondered if he had been abused. I asked him who had done that to him before, but he didn’t answer. He said he did it because it felt good. I thought I could teach him about good and bad touching.”
As a young widow in the 50s, Osborne’s mother had moved her three children to Kingston and opened a small store. “When I was growing up,” says Osborne, “the drive was to get an education, to come out and be somebody.” And that’s what she did. In the late 60s she mixed with the country’s political and social elite as a member of the women’s national cricket team, and in 1967 she won the Miss Jamaica Nation beauty contest. “It was a lark,” she says, “but the prize intrigued me.” The prize was a trip to London
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Then the authorities sent her to an orphanage in the country, the Pringle Home for Children, which is run by the United Church in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. “It’s on top of a hill, kind of isolated–an old institution with a lot of kids running around playing,” says Osborne. “But it seemed clean and orderly.” She produces a copy of a letter from the director of the adoption board to the superintendent of Pringle, asking that she be allowed to meet David. “He was a sweetheart,” she says, her eyes filling with tears as she remembers meeting him for the first time. “He was engaging, a nice boy. That first day he told me some older kids were beating him up. I realized he was already recruiting me to be his advocate. That was pretty impressive. I liked that.”
But Osborne wanted another opinion about the boy. “I asked an 80-year-old woman, a friend’s mother, to go back to the home with me,” she says. “She’s a wise woman and knows children. She also was charmed.” Osborne thought she’d found the right child. “I asked him if he’d like me to be his mommy, and he said, ‘Can you come back for me on Saturday?’”
On May 31, 2002, the director of the Ministry of Health’s Children Services Division wrote a letter to the superintendent of Pringle asking that David be “discharged for adoption,” because he would “be traveling to the USA to reside with Miss Osborne.” Osborne picked David up in early June, spent two weeks with him in Jamaica, then flew with him to Chicago, where, because of a paperwork mix-up, the adoption process continued.
She talked again with her therapist friend. “I wasn’t sure what to do,” she says. She repeatedly asked David to tell her what had happened to him in the past. Finally one night, she says, “he admitted that he used to do that with dogs at Pringle.” She begged him for more details. “Tomorrow I will tell you two more things,” he said. Eventually he related a string of events. “He told me about the dogs, other children, and beatings by adults,” she says. “He also admitted he had done things with young children since he’d arrived here.” Later he admitted to doing things with the dogs of her friends here too. She tape-recorded his answers and included quotes from the transcript in letters she subsequently wrote to the Jamaican government.
Osborne began making plans to return to Jamaica. “I decided I had to take him back,” she says. “My goal was to do an investigation, put people in jail, and get help paying for his therapy.” A flurry of communications ensued. In late August she had a phone conversation with an official in the Children Services Division and told him she was bringing the boy back. A letter to the same official stated in capital letters that a child therapist had advised her David “should not be placed in a foster home or place of safety home with children or animals.”
