A KISS BEFORE DYING

“GOODBYE ma, I love you.”

With these words Stephon Frontin, 22, hugged and kissed his ailing mother as she lay on a bed at the San Fernando General Hospital on Sunday night. Hours later, Frontin was dead - shot once to the back of the head at a bar in Penal.

According to police, at about 10 pm, Frontin was at the bar liming with friends when he and another patron got into a heated argument. The man is said to have left the bar and returned shortly with a gun. Frontin did not even see his killer eye to eye as he was shot in the back of his head.

Yesterday morning, on being told that her son was dead, Arlene Frontin asked doctors for a temporary discharge so that she could go home to her family to mourn this tragedy. Arlene, who is suffering with renal failure said Frontin was the eldest of her two children.

“Three weeks ago I spent a day at hospital in an incubated state. Doctors feared the worst for me but the next day I woke up. I felt as if I had gotten a second chance at life to spend with my children. God is a good God. I didn’t know that Sunday night would be my last with Stephon. But instead of me going, it was he who is gone,” Frontin said as she sat on a couch at the family home in Penal Rock Road, Penal.

Clutching her chest, she exclaimed, “Oh God no. Oh God no...I didn’t get to say goodbye.” Frontin recalled her son visiting her at 9 pm on Sunday at hospital. “He came with food and a drink for me. We chatted for a bit and he told me he wanted me to get better. As he was leaving, he hugged me and said, ‘goodbye ma, I love you.' He then kissed me and walked away.”

Frontin said she was in alot of pain due to complications caused by her failing kidneys. This pain, I can bear, she said. "It's the fresh pain in my heart that I don't know about." Arlene's mother Lystra Hernandez said the murder of her grandson has taken a toil on her daughter.

“She is already sickly and going through so much physical pain for her now to have to endure this sorrow. My daughter’s body is weak and I don’t know how much more she can take. This is really hard for us,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez said an innocent man was killed. “My grandson was one of the kindest men you would ever meet. I remember when his mother was lying like if she was in a coma and everyone was so scared. I remember seeing Stephon pacing up and down the street that day outside the hospital. He went down on his knees praying for God to spare his mother. And the next day she woke up.”

Hernandez called for justice. On Thursday, her daughter would celebrate her 41st birthday and had hoped to spend that day with her entire family. Instead, she will be spending the day making funeral arrangements for her son. Senior police told Newsday that an arrest is imminent as several people have been questioned and gave useful information to investigators. As of press time, the murder toll stood tall at 511.