From pain to purpose

Born out of an ever-increasing need for emotional and mental healing from gun crimes, the mission of the Pamella’s Sunrise Foundation is to close these deeply inflicted psychosocial wounds, by taking people through their pain towards their purpose.

Turning around what’s traumatic can be torturous as often serious scars remain ... and Denise Johnston, founder of Pamella’s Sunrise Foundation, readily admittted that hers was a long journey towards purpose because her pain was not properly dealt with.

Her grief ... is gripping.

Horror struck the family household in the indigent Fairfield Road community of Spanish Town, Friday, March 13, 1987, another terrifying home invasion by marauding gunmen. Her mother, Evelyn Johnston, was shot, and panic stricken, the 14-year-old scaled fences attempting to flee, but was ordered back in the house by the gunmen’s cronies patrolling the yard.

She re-entered just in time to stop her brother from attacking one of the gunmen with a machete as he was unaware of the others outside. Frantically running through thorny bushes after the ordeal, bruised and blooded as a result, she was still unable to secure help from neighbours, fearing for their own lives.

Her mother, bravely enduring the pain from her gunshot wounds, slipped eventually away from the house and walked some considerable distance before getting a taxi to take her to the Spanish Town Hospital.

Even in her despair, Evelyn Johnston, matriarch and model of the caring and compassionate, helped to nurse others at the hospital who would thereafter assist the family’s efforts to restore their lives.

Terror strikes again

Putting the pieces back together, terror was to strike a more telling blow. Some nine months afterwards, living relatively comfortable elsewhere in Spanish Town, the evening of Monday, December 7, 1987, was to be one of untold grief. Her sister, Woman Constable Pamella Johnston (on a bus to work on her day-off because she was getting married on Christmas Day) became Jamaica’s first policewoman to be killed by gunmen in the line of duty.

Gunmen boarded the bus, stopped by women in Greendale in Spanish Town, and she was brutally raped and murdered as she tearfully told her attackers that she was pregnant. Another passenger was to lose his life – Fendel Pearson, father of family friends and hospital porter in uniform (mistaken as that of a prison warder) as he too begged for Johnston’s life. He was shot in his mouth in front of his eight-year-old daughter.

As far as Denise Johnston was concerned, this was not happening, so on hearing she kept calling 119 ... because her sister was a 119 operator and could not be anywhere else, but work.

“Just as life was getting good,” she faintly whispered. “She was the glue of the family, holding us together. It broke my family, it scattered us. It was very painful for us even to be in a room together. I have carried a lot of pain.”

At 15, she was to carry 23 more years of pain in Jamaica without grievance counselling. Supported by a strong mother who made every effort to gently steer the family towards life’s focus, in the wider society there was still, however, no real place to grieve. A student at The Queen’s School when it happened, proper counselling, she recalled, was not readily provided as teachers kept remarking that they had never seen anything like it ... and didn’t know how to deal with it.

“We’re not a country that’s socialised to deal with trauma,” she said. “We’re better at it now, but we’ve had a history where it’s just buried and you move on. Basic needs take precedence over the psychological needs. You go after the education, the job ... and we push aside the emotional needs.”

During those years in Jamaica without intervention, she would often be told that it was time to get over it – that it was full time for her to be healed ... but wounds would remain open without particular counsellors to guide her through her grief.

Granted parole

She would leave for California, a decision largely informed by the eventual granting of parole to one of her sister’s murderers whom she was asked to pardon. She did not approve, asking, interestingly, if he was reformed. Denise Johnston sad she was never given a straight answer, only a troubled response by the parole officer of how there was really no reform in the prison system. Returning four years afterwards, she would be further traumatised by more horrifying details (previously unknown to her) of how her sister was slaughtered ... how terribly she suffered.

Broken, splintered, the healing she sought on her return to California was delivered through grievance counselling by the hands of Christian Ministry ... providing purpose through the passage of her pain. It would fashion how the Pamella Sunrise Foundation was formed, launched on December 1, 2024, at the Real Life Church, Sacramento, California, and on December 7, 2024, in Jamaica at the Little Theatre where more than 500 children, affected by gun violence, were in attendance to a comedy that had them laughing throughout and lifting their spirits.

“Stories were comfortably told to me,’” she said, “because I had gone through an experience they could identify with. I shared my story openly with them so they felt comfortable talking to me about theirs. No longer must children be seen and not heard ... or be asked why they haven’t yet gotten over what’s troubling them. As much as you want to talk about it we’re here to listen ... and you cannot heal from what you don’t reveal.”

The Foundation engages licensed therapists who are Christians, “enabling you”, she said, “with guided questions to think of a different thought pattern than the one you’re on to take out of your pain”.

It’s faith-based counselling with a network of counsellors providing online services as well, and there are training workshops where persons not only learn to deal with their grief, they also learn to help others with theirs.

The course provided is one of understanding grief, finding closure to your grief and the whole issue of forgiveness.

There is light in her eyes when she relays that in July of last year, Tanasha Edwards Blagrove, daughter of one of the men who murdered her sister, reached out for forgiveness through a TikTok video. She felt she was hated and was carrying a generational curse because of what her father had done.

Johnston replied through a Facebook posting that she would be embraced. They met, prayed together and agreed to work together for the Foundation so that stories can be shared, importantly, on how the trauma affects both families and all parties, an exercise to be supported by more bridges being laid with the ministries of national security and education, the police and the correctional services.

More wounds would be closed. More hearts would be healed.

editorial@gleanerjm.com