The Tribune

By JADE RUSSELL

Tribune Staff Reporter

jrussell@tribunemedia.net

DIAMOND Stubbs should have been turning 18 next week and getting her first car. Instead, her father will mark the day at her grave on a Cat Island beach, beside the best friend who died with her in the Shirley Street crash.

Diamond’s father, Damian Stubbs, told The Tribune that as her November 5 birthday approaches, the pain of losing her has become harder to bear.

“I can’t tell you the last time I felt like celebrating anything from she died,” Mr Stubbs said yesterday. “I came to Nassau about three weeks ago. I haven’t went back to Cat Island as yet because I was actually trying to stay away from the graveyard.”

Mr Stubbs had been visiting the girls’ graves every day to talk to them about his day. He travelled to New Providence for a mental break, but plans to return to Cat Island for his daughter’s birthday, when the family will gather at the graveyard to celebrate her life and the bright future she had ahead of her.

“I think a few of her friends would probably stop by as well,” he said. “But most likely, it’s going to turn into a little beach party because the graveyard is right on the beach. So we’re going to do whatever we think she’d like and she loves the beach.”

Diamond and her best friend, Stania Webb, were buried next to each other in separate mausoleums in July. Their families said it was important for the girls to remain together in death as they had been in life.

Mr Stubbs fondly recalled how, every birthday, Diamond would send him a list of gifts she wanted and ask him to choose one.

He said not a day goes by that he does not think about her.

“Sometimes when I’m feeling down, I would just go and listen to some of her voice notes,” he said. He also often watches videos of her singing and dancing.

“That’s how I find joy,” he said, “because if I didn’t have those things, I really would’ve gone crazy.”

Mr Stubbs said if his daughter was alive, he would tell her how proud he was of the amazing person she had become.

Diamond graduated as valedictorian and head girl of Old Bight High School just two weeks before the crash. She had been due to begin her first year at Langston University in Oklahoma, where she planned to major in criminal justice.

She was one of five teenagers killed on June 28 in what has been described as the deadliest traffic accident in The Bahamas in at least 20 years. The others were Stania Webb, 19; Keno Gordon Jr, 19; Bertrica Brown, 18; and Evalena Johnson, 19. Bianca Mathurin and Shawn Thurston, 21, survived the crash but remain in hospital recovering from their injuries.

The group was travelling in a Mazda sedan carrying eight people when it crashed into a tree near the intersection of Shirley Street and Church Street in the early hours of the morning.

Most of the teenagers grew up together in Cat Island, and Diamond, Stania and Bertrica shared a particularly close bond. Their deaths left the island’s community heartbroken.

The driver, Marcus Thacker Jr, 19, faces five counts of vehicular manslaughter. He was granted $30,000 bail in July, and his case is being sent to the Supreme Court by voluntary bill of indictment.