The 50th Murder Victim: TaGia Soles-Armony (1980–2009)

The Bahamas recorded 78 murders in 2007 and 73 in 2008. By the 7th of August 2009, the count for that year had already risen — shockingly, and without pause — to fifty. The fiftieth name on that list was TaGia Soles Armony.

TaGia was twenty-nine years old. She was breastfeeding her three-month-old son. She was sitting outside her mother’s home in Sea Breeze Estates, two days after arriving in Nassau to introduce her baby to the family she had missed every day of her life in St. Kitts.

She had been home for forty-eight hours.

Two hours before she was shot, she had ended a phone call with her husband Kachi, telling him she was rallying the troops to go to the mall.

Her last words to him were: “I love you.”

A Life Worth Living: The Sunrise of TaGia Soles Armony

TaGia — Lady T to her siblings, Auntie T to those who came later — was born at 5:08 in the morning on the 20th of July 1980 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the third child of Maxine and Gordon Soles, guarded from the beginning by her older siblings Giahna and Kurt, and by her grandmother. She would later assume that same protective instinct over her younger sisters Paige and Greer — carrying forward, without being asked, the architecture of love and watchfulness that her own childhood had been built upon.

Her father wrote in her baby book, from the very beginning: she has a smile that captures your heart.

He was not wrong. He would not be the last to say so.

Education and the Woman She Became

TaGia attended Xavier’s Lower School and St. Andrew’s High School in the Bahamas, then Havergal College in Ontario, and finally Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, where she graduated with a degree in Commerce. She worked as an accountant. She was formidably competent — the kind of person whose professional ability was taken for granted by those around her because everything else about her was so much more vivid.

She was known as a fighter. As a child she found it difficult to accept instructions such as stay still or come here, and she often took to running outside and waiting until her parents had forgotten about whatever mischief had prompted the instruction. That uninhibited spirit did not disappear as she grew — it simply refined itself. The running was replaced by long letters and emails, carefully composed, explaining her feelings about your actions and precisely how you might go about fixing them.

She talked a lot. She laughed a lot. She smiled, cared, loved and lived — fully, deliberately, and on her own terms. Well… that’s TaGia, her siblings would say, when no other explanation would do. Determined to be who she was. If ya didn’t like it, tough — a lesson, she said, that she had learned from her grandmother.

Kachi, St. Kitts, and the Life She Chose

At Dalhousie she met the love of her life. Kachi Armony was, as her Bahamian family noted with some amusement, a man who looked a little like Gordon Soles — which perhaps explained something, and perhaps explained everything. They were together for more than five years before they formalised what everyone around them already understood. On the 15th of January 2005 they married in St. Kitts, and TaGia made her home there.

It was not always easy. She loved her primary family with an intensity that made distance genuinely painful. She disliked not being surrounded by the people she had grown up with. But love, for TaGia, was never the secondary consideration — and so she stayed, and she built a life, and she became, in time, part of the fabric of Kittitian life in the way that only the genuinely open-hearted can.

She and Kachi had two sons. Chelan arrived first. Then, three months before the night of August the 7th, came Zen. TaGia’s last gift to her parents was a series of videos in which she told them how grateful she was to have them. And the birth of one more grandchild — Zen Zen, as he came to be known — who would grow up hearing stories about a mother whose smile, every person who knew her would tell him, was the first thing you remembered and the last thing you forgot.

August 7, 2009: Where Society’s Failure Became One Family’s Permanent Tragedy

TaGia Armony had come home to introduce Zen to the family. She had been in Nassau for two days.

She was sitting in her Honda Accord outside her mother’s home in Sea Breeze Estates, nursing her three-month-old son, when a man approached the vehicle and told her to open up. TaGia Soles Armony, who had never in her life been the kind of woman to stay still when told to, drove off.

He shot her. He ran after the car and shot again.

The fatal bullet passed through her left arm, into the left side below the armpit, through the heart and both lungs. It came to rest embedded in the car seat — inches from where Zen was screaming. She attempted to flee. She died in her own blood, her baby at her side, two days after coming home.

She was the fiftieth murder victim in The Bahamas that year. She was twenty-nine years old, three weeks past her birthday, three months into motherhood, two hours past telling her husband she loved him.

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2,449 Days From Murder To Sentence: The Justice That Followed — and the Justice That Did Not

A young man known by the street name Ballistic — Valentino Hanna Dorsett — was charged with her murder. In June 2011, nearly two years after TaGia died outside her mother’s home, Justice Jon Isaacs released Dorsett on $30,000 bail, fitted with an ankle bracelet.

“27 years in jail for killer of breastfeeding mother” Tue, Apr 26th 2016, 02:09 PM https://www.bahamaslocal.com/newsitem/150662/27_years_in_jail_for_killer_of_breastfeeding_mother.html

Thirty thousand dollars. For the killing of a breastfeeding mother on her own mother’s property. He was free to go.

The trial came eventually. It always does, in The Bahamas. Eventually.

From the night of August 7, 2009 — when TaGia Soles Armony was shot through the heart while nursing her three-month-old son — to the morning of April 21, 2016, when a verdict was finally returned, was 2,449 days. Two thousand four hundred and forty-nine days. Zen Armony, who was screaming in the car seat beside his dying mother on night one, was approaching his seventh birthday by the time the court was done. His brother Chelan, who was two years old when his mother was taken, was nearly nine. Two little boys who had spent the better part of their entire conscious lives waiting for a Bahamian court to decide what to call what had been done to their mother.

In February 2016, a jury returned a hung verdict of seven to five on the murder charge. Not murder. Manslaughter — nine to three. Attempted armed robbery — eleven to one. Justice Ian Winder acknowledged that it was only by sheer miracle that the infant TaGia was nursing had not been struck by the same bullet that killed her. He sentenced Dorsett to twenty-seven years, reduced by five already spent on remand.

And then the defence asked the court for mercy.

The Sickening Metric of a Society That Weighed a Difficult Childhood Against a Murdered Mother and her Family’s Unimaginable Loss

The probation report submitted on Dorsett’s behalf asked Justice Winder to consider a disadvantaged childhood. An expulsion from school in the ninth grade. A difficult start in life.

Let us be precise about what was being asked.

On one side of that argument: a hard childhood and an early exit from formal education — circumstances that are real, that matter, and that represent a genuine failure of the society that produced them.

On the other side: a twenty-nine-year-old woman sitting in her own vehicle on her mother’s property, nursing her three-month-old son — a child she had carried for nine months and delivered three months prior — shot through the left arm, the bullet travelling into the left side of her chest, through her heart, through both lungs, and coming to rest in the car seat inches from the screaming infant at her breast. A woman who drove away when told to surrender her car, because she was TaGia, and TaGia did not surrender. A woman who died in her own blood trying to save herself and her child while her killer ran after the car and fired a second shot.

The defence asked the court to weigh those two things against each other. A hackneyed pitiful excuse used in a thousand similar cases, a thousand times over, against the life of a mother feeding her baby.

A disadvantaged childhood does not pull a trigger. Expulsion from school in the ninth grade does not chase a car down a residential street and fire a second shot at a fleeing mother nursing a newborn.

“Tagia Soles-Armory’s accused murderer granted bail.”Jun 10, 2011 https://www.bahamaspress.com/tagia-soles-armory’s-murder-accused-given-bail-another-man-shot-and-killed-by-police/

The circumstances that shaped Valentino Dorsett are a social indictment — of failing schools, of absent intervention, of a society that repeatedly encounters young men in crisis and does nothing productive until those young men do something that cannot be ignored. That indictment is real and it is serious. But it is an indictment of the state, not a mitigation for the act. Conflating the two — placing a difficult adolescence on the same moral scales as the hunting and killing of a breastfeeding woman on her mother’s property — is not compassion. It is an intellectual and moral failure dressed as jurisprudence.

TaGia Soles Armony did not have a difficult childhood weighed against her when she was told to open up. She just had a gun pointed at her head.

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A Society Inured To Violence: A Society That Forgets Its Victims

TaGia Soles Armony was the fiftieth murder victim in The Bahamas in 2009. She was not an abstraction. She was not a statistic. She was a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, and a friend — and she was reduced to a number in a tally that Bahamian society had long since learned to absorb without convulsion.

This is the deeper indictment. Not of one court, or one judge, or one jury, or one defence lawyer doing their professional duty. But of an entire post-colonial society that has watched its murder rate climb to levels that would be considered a national emergency in any country with a functioning relationship between its government and its conscience — and has continued, year after year, to absorb the numbers, file the paperwork, and move on.

The murder rate across Caribbean nations in the post-colonial, post-independence era is beyond any reasonable measure of civilised morality. These are free nations. Sovereign nations. Nations that fought, marched, and organised for the right to govern themselves. And they are governing themselves into a quiet catastrophe of bloodshed that the colonial powers they replaced could not have inflicted more efficiently had they tried.

The Bahamas is not alone. Jamaica. Trinidad. St. Kitts — where TaGia herself had made her home. Nation after nation across the Caribbean posts murder rates that dwarf those of the countries their citizens emigrate to, the countries whose tourists they welcome, the countries whose development loans they service. The violence is not imported. It is domestic. It is internal. It is ours. And the victims — the TaGias, the mothers and daughters and sons and fathers who are shot in cars and on corners and outside their own homes — are overwhelmingly our own people, killing and being killed in communities that independence was supposed to liberate and that governance has instead abandoned.

The criminal justice system that took 2,449 days to return a manslaughter verdict for a woman shot while breastfeeding her infant is not a broken system. A broken system implies something that once worked and has since failed. What the Bahamian criminal justice system represents — with its bail hearings and its ankle bracelets and its hung juries and its probation reports citing ninth-grade expulsions as counterweights to murder — is a system that was never adequately built for the scale of what it is being asked to manage, in a society that has never adequately reckoned with why the scale got this large.

The victims are forgotten because forgetting is easier than reckoning. The numbers rise because accountability is harder than rhetoric. And every year, somewhere in Nassau or Kingston or Port of Spain or Basseterre, another mother sits in a car with her child and has no reason to believe that the country she lives in has made any serious commitment to ensuring she gets home.

TaGia Soles Armony trusted that she was safe outside her own mother’s home, in her own car, in her own country, on a visit to show her newborn son to the family she loved. That trust cost her everything. The society that failed to protect her has not yet paid anything close to a commensurate price.

The Final Arithmetic

Valentino Dorsett received a twenty-seven year sentence. Reduced by five years on remand, he will serve twenty-two. He was thirty-three years old at sentencing. He will be in his mid-fifties when he is released, alive — older than TaGia ever had the opportunity to become, — and with decades ahead of him.

TaGia was twenty-nine years old when she was murdered.

The sentence handed down for the taking of her life was shorter than the life she was permitted to live. Twenty-seven years against twenty-nine. The court, in its arithmetic, came within two years of matching what God and her parents had given her.

What it could not restore — what no sentence in any jurisdiction has ever restored — was the remaining decades that a woman of her health, her vitality, and her irreducible spirit had every right to expect. Chelan and Zen Armony will be grown men before Valentino Dorsett is free. They will have lived their entire childhoods, their adolescence, and the early years of their adulthood in the shadow of eight seconds on a residential street in Sea Breeze Estates.

Their mother was twenty-nine years old.

TaGia’s children’s sentence has no release date.

A Final Word

The Bahamas that TaGia Soles Armony returned to in August 2009 was a country recording murders at a rate that had long since ceased to shock the people living inside it. Seventy-eight in 2007. Seventy-three in 2008. Fifty by the 7th of August 2009. Numbers that accumulate the way all statistics do — until they have a name, a face, a father’s entry in a baby book, two sons, a husband who answered the phone two hours before everything ended, and a smile that, by every account of everyone who ever saw it, captured your heart the moment it turned in your direction.

She was not just the 50th murder victim for The Bahamas in 2009, she was TaGia. Lady T. Auntie T. Daughter, sister, wife, mother, and friend. And as she always said at the end: “Love ya.”

TaGia Monai Patricia Soles Armony: Born Philadelphia, July 20, 1980. Died Nassau, August 7, 2009, aged twenty-nine. Survived by her husband Kachi Armony; her sons Chelan and Zen Armony; her parents Gordon and Maxine Soles; her sisters Giahna, Paige and Greer Soles; her brother Kurt Major; and all those whose lives she lit.

“She is clothed with strength and dignity, and she laughs without fear of the future. When she speaks, her words are wise, and she gives instructions with kindness.” Proverbs 31:25-26: