What Violence Leaves Behind: Kyhiliee Chamar Wallace (1980–2012) and Twenty-Five Fatherless Children

Kyhiliee Chamar Wallace was shot five times and left in the bushes off Marshall Road in New Providence on Tuesday 28th of November, 2012. He would not be found for twelve long days.

Kyhiliee was thirty-two years old, the father of twenty-five children, and the State’s witness in a murder trial — and what his death and sadly others like him have left behind are questions that has gone unanswered since 1967, since the very dawn of Majority Rule governance in The Bahamas.

Violent crime in The Bahamas has moved beyond crisis into something more permanent — a sociopolitical turning point and a sociocultural phenomenon that has gouged out an indelible place in the country’s history, law, demographics, and national identity.

It has reshaped the way Bahamians speak, carry themselves, raise their children, and measure what is possible. Violent crime leaves its mark not only in courtrooms and morgues but in classrooms, households, and the quiet thoughts of a people still learning to reckon with what it has lost.

Kyhiliee Chamar (Lee) Wallace

He came into the world on the 17th of August, 1980, the first child of Beverly Boyd and Edwin Wallace. They named him Kyhilice Chamar Wallace. Everyone called him Lee.

He attended W.V. Eneas Preschool, Centreville Primary, and L.W. Young Senior School. Wanting more, he crossed to Miami, studied at Killian Middle and South Ridge Senior High, then completed computer engineering at Lindsey Hopkins Technical Institute. He came home to Nassau, ran an import-export business, and managed projects for Billy Treco Construction Company. He loved music, loved to swim, and spent summers in Ragged Island with his brothers. He looked out for everyone around him — younger cousins, siblings, friends — and his word to all of them was the same: I gat this. It meant: I will handle it. You will not fall while I am here.

On the 17th of November, 2012, he did not come home.

He had last been seen getting into a car with someone he knew.

Twelve days later, a man led police to Wallace’s body in the bushes at Tranquil Circle, off Marshall Road.

He had been shot five times — three in the head, twice in the body.

He was thirty-two years old.

Bail, Betrayal, and the Limits of the Law

Lee was not simply a victim of street violence. He was a witness for the State — the principal witness against a man accused of shooting a relative at Strachan’s Corner. His decision to come forward took real courage in a city where cooperation with the law can get you killed.

The man believed to have arranged his murder was at the time on bail for two previous murders. Let’s read that again.

He knew who Lee was. He knew what Lee had seen. And the State that had asked Lee to testify had done nothing sufficient to keep him alive. When people understand that coming forward may cost them their lives — and when that understanding is confirmed again and again — trust in the State does not just weaken. It collapses. The criminal becomes the authority. The witness becomes the target. Communities learn to stay quiet and call it survival, which is exactly what it is.

The Evidence Act allows the statements of deceased witnesses to be used at trial. It is a reasonable legal provision. It is also an admission that the State may not be able to protect the people it asks to speak on its behalf. The system has already made room for its own failure. What it has not done is refuse to accept that failure as normal.

What Violence Leaves Behind

Whatever opinions society may have formed about Kyhiliee Wallace’s life and death, society does not get to look away from what he left behind.

Whether Bahamians acknowledge it or not, his killing — and every killing like it — leaves a bill that the whole society eventually pays. The cost does not stay within the family. It moves into schools, into neighbourhoods, into the daily life we all share. His twenty-five children will grow up and build their own lives here in The Bahamas, carrying the knowledge of how their father died. They will become our teachers, our nurses, our tradespeople, our neighbours. What they carry with them, we will all one day meet.

Twenty-five children. Twenty-five children growing up without the man who said I gat this and was killed for meaning it.

Violence does not only hurt the person it is directed at. It spreads. It lands on mothers raising children alone. It lands on brothers and sisters carrying questions they may never get answers to. It lands on communities that take in each new killing, go quiet around it, and are changed by it whether they want to be or not. What violence leaves behind is broken structure — broken households, broken finances, children who learn far too early that the people who protect them can be taken away without warning.

The damage goes wider than any one family. There comes a point where violence stops feeling like an emergency and starts feeling like just the way things are. The Bahamas has been moving toward that point for more than a generation. When it arrives, a murder in the morning paper no longer shocks people — it only confirms what they already feared. Young men adjust where they go, who they are seen with, what they say out loud and what they keep to themselves. Children watch all of this and take notes. By the time they are grown, the lessons are already inside them. The world has been made smaller than it should have been, before they ever had the chance to find out how large it could be.

The Reckoning We Have Deferred

Khyiliee Wallace’s story is not only a Bahamian story. Across the Caribbean — , Trinidad, Jamaica, Belize, Haiti, Barbados— the violent deaths of young Black men represent one of the most persistent failures of the post-independence era.

We built parliaments, wrote constitutions, trained judges and police officers, and took rightful pride in governing ourselves. And in city after city, decade after decade, the young men have kept dying — not under colonial rule, but in streets we now govern ourselves.

The starting conditions at Majority Rule and independence were difficult, and no one who looks honestly at the history would pretend otherwise. But nations are built over generations, and a generation is long enough to make meaningful progress. Across the Caribbean, that progress on public safety has been slower than it should have been, and slower than our people deserve. That is the challenge our governments must now face with more honesty and more urgency than they have shown so far.

The twenty-five children of Kyhiliee Chamar Wallace are growing up in a Bahamas that has not yet found a way to fully account for them — not for them, nor for the mothers raising them alone, nor for the witnesses who came forward and did not survive it, nor for the communities that have been left to find their own way to safety. A government’s most basic promise to its people is simple: that they may live without the constant fear of violent death. In too many of our communities, that promise has worn thin.

“I Gat This”

His name was Kyhilice Chamar Wallace. He was thirty-two years old and he said I gat this and he meant it — about his children, about his family, about the people who depended on him, and in the end, about the truth he agreed to tell in a court of law.

He did not get to tell it. But his twenty-five children are here. They are growing up in the country he trusted enough to stand up for. The least that country can do is become worthy of that trust.

That is the work still in front of us.

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Kyhiliee Chamar (Lee) Wallace was born on the 17th of August, 1980, and died on the 28th of November, 2012. He would not be laid to rest until 21st September 2013. He was thirty-two years old. He left twenty-five children. He left a name worth remembering.

This essay is part of the Bahamian Lives, Bahamian Legacies series, dedicated to the memory of the Rt. Honourable Bradley B. Roberts, who believed that every Bahamian life carried a story worth telling, and that a democracy is measured not by the heights it lifts its finest citizens to, but by the care it extends to its most vulnerable.