Woman ‘terrified’ after incident at Spotts Beach

Jolene Nelson-Henry went to Spotts Beach with her friends on Monday, 21 March to seek some serenity before the work week began; instead she said she was attacked and left traumatised, her sense of safety shaken.

Nelson-Henry, still upset and hurting from the attack, told the Cayman Compass while at the beach, a man aggressively charged at the trio and kicked her hand, as she was seated recording his verbal assault.

That kick sent her phone flying and in turn caused her hand to strike her face, leaving bruises.

The women filmed the encounter, a copy of which was provided to the Compass. Due to the matter being under investigation and the nature of the incident the faces have been blurred.

Her friends, sisters Brittani and Brooke Seymour, sprung into action to stop the man from further charging at her and kicking again.

She said she never expected that she would have been attacked on a public beach.

“It’s terrifying,” she said during a telephone interview two days after the attack, saying she does not feel safe to ever go to the beach alone nor let her daughter and her friends go either.

“It’s sunk into me that me being able to go at sunrise by myself… I’ve never had a concern; 2am, midnight, whenever you feel like going to the beach, it’s always there and [I can’t] anymore. I can’t go to the beach by myself anymore. I can’t,” she said, sighing heavily.

Upset by response

Nelson-Henry asked that her photo not be used, as she is fearful for her safety.

She said they called police and was told no one was available at the time as they were changing shifts.

“We waited for 40 minutes and when nobody came and he started to make his way over to the wall, we decided that we needed to leave,” she said.

Two hours later, she said, officers met the trio and took their statement.

She said she was not impressed; the officers acted as if it was a trivial matter and were hesitant to proceed.

“They were like ‘So, you want to make an official report?… You want to press charges?’ [I said] ‘Yes, we want to press charges and we want to know why nobody showed up,’” Nelson-Henry said.

The police, in a statement to the Compass, said they were investigating the cause of the delay in response to this incident.

“[We] acknowledge that a change of shift is not an acceptable reason for a delay in a call to service,” the statement said.

It also said the alleged assault is under investigation, and no arrests had been made as of press time.

Unexpected attack

Nelson-Henry said everything happened so quickly that she is still processing the events and even re-watching the video has been triggering for her.

“In the moment, it’s anger and the defensiveness that pops out. But by the time we were at the police station and making the report and giving them the videos… looking at it again, we all just kind of started shaking, realising how easily this could have gone a completely different way. It would be a very different police report and a very different story and that is the damage; that’s absolutely way, way more damaging for us,” she said.

Nelson-Henry said she had decided to use the beach as a place to come together regularly, to talk or do yoga to find their centre, and this was the first time they were meeting.

She said when they got there at 6:30am, they noticed the man jogging. They did not pay him any attention and sat down.

While talking, she said they noticed the man running closer to where they were sitting and on his third lap back, he was so close, he was kicking sand at them.

She said they asked him to stop and that triggered an instant aggressive response which took them by surprise.

“He spins around and his hands go flailing and he goes, ‘Why are you doing this to me? Why the [expletive] are you doing this to me? I come here all the time. I was here first. This is my beach. Why the [expletive] are you here?’ We recoiled and literally put out hands up… it was a lot, it was really intense,” she said.

She said her friends asked him to calm down and said his reaction was not necessary.

The man, she said, then ran off and repeated the same action coming closer and closer to them as he did his laps and nearly stepped on Brittani’s feet.

She said after that, he ended his run and went to the table behind them, picked up his water bottle and approached the women.

Nelson-Henry said at first she thought he was apologising for his outburst but instead the situation took a dark turn as he lamented division in Cayman.

“He goes, ‘You know, the worst thing about this is the three of you sound like you’re Caymanian, and I can tell you one thing. That’s good because if you were foreigners, this would have gone completely different.’ We kind of look[ed] at him like, ‘I’m sorry, excuse me’? He says ‘If you were foreigners, I would kick sand in unna [expletive] faces and if that didn’t work, I got my something in my [expletive] car I would bring down here to deal with unna’. So at this point, I felt incredibly threatened,” she said.

Nelson-Henry, who is Jamaican but is the mother of two Caymanian children, said she was taken aback. She said the man then charged at them aggressively, as they were sitting on the sand.

She said she grabbed her phone from her lap and began recording and he responded violently.

On the video the man shouted, ‘Don’t you [expletive] do that’ and then kicked Nelson-Henry’s hand.

The cellphone landed a short distance away, and although there was no video, the voices of the man and the women could be heard arguing.

The man then took his fins and got into the water.

Men need to step up

Nelson-Henry said she shuddered to think what would have happened if any one of them had been on their own.

“It’s terrifying because if it was one of us [there], what would the situation have been? Where would he have drawn the line?” she asked.

She said she has been frequenting Spotts Beach for the 20 years she has lived in Cayman and this was the first time she has experienced such an incident.

It has left her scarred.

“I’ve been in previous abusive relationships. I’ve been attacked, viciously attacked and I’ve never felt the way I did with this man I do not know approaching us on the beach and doing this, and getting no support… like nobody showed up for us at all,” she said.

Nelson-Henry said the level of abuse and harassment women face in Cayman needs urgent attention. She also advocated for protections like pepper spray and tasers.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that he was coming back after me again, none. That shouldn’t happen to anybody, foreign or local. Nobody should feel like that,” she said.

She said women have been speaking out about this, but it takes the men to also take a stand and stop this from happening.

“It’ll take other men to stand up publicly, privately, to open their mouths and say that we’re not going to sit for this, allow it or hold space for other men who do. Because nobody listens to us at the end of the day; I’m sorry to say but this is not a matriarchal society. We are disposable, that’s it,” she said.

She said she will be returning to the beach with her friends, because she will not be intimidated or silenced.