A teary-eyed Tessa Allen (second left) hugs her daughters, Allian Gordon (left) and Alison Gordon at their Hart Street tenement yard yesterday. Inset: A young Alia Vernon. (Photo: Allan Lewin)

MONTEGO BAY, St James - Family members and friends of 12-year-old Alia Vernon were yesterday still trying to figure out if a dispute with one of her sisters over a pair of shorts on Thursday could have led her to take her own life.

Alia's (affectionately called "Leia") lifeless body was found hanging by a piece of cloth from a beam in a section of a two-room board house at about 5:45 pm, at a tenement yard in Hart Street, Montego Bay, where she lived with her mother, Tessa Allen, and two sisters.

The gruesome discovery was made by Allen within an hour after Alia strongly expressed her disapproval of her 11-year-old sister, Alison Gordon, wearing her pair of shorts. It came also shortly after she was reprimanded by her mom for her stance.

A grade seven student of the Maldon Comprehensive High School in St James, Alia, reportedly locked herself in her room and turned up the volume on the stereo after the scolding.

"When I went to check on 'Leia', I see the door to her room locked, so mi beat the door and beat the door, but mi hear no answer. Mi den get in a rage and kicked the door open, and when mi look, mi see her hanging from the ceiling by a red blouse and *lo** running down her nose," Allen recounted. "Mi then lift her out of it, and mi see seh she dead," she added, bursting in tears.

She said Alia was later taken to the nearby Cornwall Regional Hospital where she was pronounced dead.

Yesterday, scores of family members and neighbours converged at the tenement yard to offer their condolences.
"Mi really sorry fi hear what happen; mi still can't believe it," a neighbour said.

She added that Alia was a very quiet little girl, who spoke seldomly.

"Most of the time she don't talk; if she have any problems it would be hard for us to know," she said.
Another family member told the Observer that Alia, had in the past threatened to "kill herself".

"Mi hear she seh sometimes that she going to run away and kill herself," she said.

Alia, however, has been described as a hard-working student who gave "no trouble in school".

"She do her school work; she don't give trouble at school, but she suck her finger a lot," one of her classmates said