By SANCHESKA BROWN

Tribune Staff Reporter

sbrown@tribunemedia.net

LEVITA Thurston said she will never forget the blank look in her daughter’s eyes as she lay dead and cold in her arms after being shot in the head in front of their home.

Georgette Rahming, 21, became the country’s 61st murder victim this year – and the third in three days in the capital – after she was shot late on Tuesday night off Baillou Hill Road.

According to police, shortly after 11pm, Ms Rahming was standing on the porch of her home on Palmetto Avenue, when she became involved in an argument with a man who shot her in the face and fled the scene.

However, Mrs Thurston told The Tribune that her daughter was sitting outside using her cell phone when “someone snuck into the yard and shot her”.

Outside her home yesterday, the distraught mother said her daughter was threatened on Sunday but decided not to report the incident to police “out of fear for her life.” It is a decision Mrs Thurston said she would regret forever.

“She died in my hands,” Mrs Thurston said, fighting back tears. “She came running to me in the house. She was sitting in a chair outside. They came in the yard when people were inside and she was sitting on her phone – she didn’t see it coming. I heard the shots, she ran inside and she dropped.

“No one knows how it feels to have a child leave like that, to die in your arms. I lay on the side of my child like I was breast feeding her all over again and she was gushing blood out her mouth and her nose. She took her last breath and she was gone.

“She look at me and screamed, I can still see her looking at me. She screamed ‘mommy’ over and over. I won’t hear it again, I will not hear her call me mommy again. All we have is just pictures. Just pictures. They don’t know when they kill people they leave the family distraught, it is us who hurt. They don’t know what they did to me.”

Mrs Thurston admitted that her daughter had a troubled past, but said she recently “got her act together” and changed “her bad ways”. She said her daughter recently revealed she had been a victim of sexual abuse, something the family thinks led her down a bad path when she was younger.

Mrs Thurston said despite it all, her daughter was a “happy person” who enjoyed living her life to the fullest. “We nicknamed her ‘Giggly’ because she was always a happy person. We found out that she was molested and that explained why she was getting into problems,” Mrs Thurston said.

“Recently she said to me, ‘Mommy you know I love you so much, that is why I change, you don’t see I don’t get lock up no more mommy, because I love you, I love you so much.’ I will never forget that.”

Up to press time, police had no suspect in custody. Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 911 or 919, the Central Detective Unit at 502-9991 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 328-TIPS.