Please send Hailey home

“PLEASE, please, I am begging, don’t do anything to my grand baby. Please just send her home to us. She is just 12 years!” This was the emotional cry of a grandmother as she yesterday begged abductors to release Hailey Kinsale.

The standard-five student of the Marabella Anglican Primary School has been reportedly missing for the past three days. She was last seen by her grandmother Samdayah Singh playing with her friends at a basketball court near the family Roy Joseph Street, San Fernando, apartment last Thursday evening.

According to a police report, at about 7.15 pm that night, residents also observed Kinsale walking near the basketball court. However police said when Singh went to check on her granddaughter she was nowhere to be found. Police said Kinsale was of mixed decent, five feet five inches tall, of medium build with dark skin and long, curly black hair. She was last seen wearing a blue jersey with silver stars on the front.

Police also said the girl had on a pair of long plaid pants with a brown slippers. When Sunday Newsday visited the family yesterday, Singh sat outside her apartment building looking on with hopeful eyes.

The grandmother said she feels like it is all a dream and continues to pray for the safe return of her granddaughter. Kinsale, a student of the Marabella Anglican Primary School, wrote the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) examination earlier this month. Kinsale lives with her grandmother and father while her mother stays in Chaguanas.

The emotional grandmother said she shared a close bond with her granddaughter and was always careful of the company she kept. “After she wrote SEA she has been home most of the time now with me. On evenings I would allow her to go to the court and play with her friends. She would be running, skipping or playing different games with her friends and I would always watch her from the apartment,” Singh said.

On Thursday, moments before her granddaughter disappeared, Singh said she was sitting outside watching her play and then left to go indoors for a few minutes. “I left her right there outside, right there. I didn’t go inside for long. When I saw that it was getting dark I went outside to call her inside because I don’t like her out too late. I called her name over and over and there was no answer,” Singh said, neither did she see Kinsale’s friends outside.

“I, somehow, still thought that she may have been at the home of one of her friends. I went all her friends home and still there was no sign of her.” Singh said Kinsale’s friends told her they had all left the basketball court together to go to their respective homes and thought, by then, Kinsale was home. The worried grandmother said she continued to search the neighbourhood for hours and returned home empty-handed. Later that night, she went to the San Fernando Police Station to report her granddaughter missing. Singh has not been able to sleep since.

“I don’t know what to do. My granddaughter is out there and I don’t know where. I just don’t want anything to happen to her, please send her home.

“In the news you hear of young girls missing and some of them never returning. I don’t want this to be my granddaughter. Please help me find her.”

Singh said Kinsale was an intelligent girl and worked extremely hard to pass for her first choice secondary school. Anti-Kidnapping Squad police have since visited the family. Anyone with information is asked to contact the police at 999, 555, 911 or at the nearest police station.