Marjorie Hinds was out buying food in Tivoli Gardens on the morning of May 24, 2010, when the security forces moved in. Illustrations by Owen Smith

Most cemeteries replace the illusion of life’s permanence with another illusion: the permanence of a name carved in stone. Not so May Pen Cemetery, in Kingston, Jamaica, where bodies are buried on top of bodies, weeds grow over the old markers, and time humbles even a rich man’s grave. The most forsaken burial places lie at the end of a dirt path that follows a fetid gully across two bridges and through an open meadow, far enough south to hear the white noise coming off the harbor and the highway. Fifty-two concrete posts are set into the earth in haphazard groups of two and three. Each bears a small disk of black metal and a stencilled number. The majority of these mark the unclaimed dead from the last days of May, 2010, when the police and the Army assaulted the neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens, in West Kingston. The rest mark the graves of paupers.

The trouble that led to the Tivoli Gardens deaths began in August, 2009, when the United States government requested the extradition of Christopher (Dudus) Coke. In the U.S., Coke stood charged in federal court of trafficking in narcotics and firearms; in Jamaica, he was known as the country’s most powerful “don,” a community leader who also runs a criminal enterprise. He lived in Tivoli, where everyone called him “president,” and, since 2001, Jamaican police had not been able to enter the neighborhood without his permission. Coke was so powerful that Prime Minister Bruce Golding spent months resisting the extradition order. But in early May, 2010, under heavy international political pressure, Golding authorized Coke’s arrest. In response, Coke converted Tivoli and nearby Denham Town into a personal fortress. Barricades of rubble and barbed wire sprang up across major intersections. Armed sentries took up posts around Tivoli’s perimeter. It looked as though Coke were preparing for war with the Jamaican state.

On Sunday, May 23rd, the Jamaican police asked every radio and TV station in the capital to broadcast a warning that said, in part, “The security forces are appealing to the law-abiding citizens of Tivoli Gardens and Denham Town who wish to leave those communities to do so.” The police sent buses to the edge of the neighborhood to evacuate residents to temporary accommodations. But only a few boarded, and the buses drove away nearly empty.

Marjorie Hinds, who supported her family by selling groceries from a wooden shed, was one of the residents who ignored the warning. She was thirty-seven years old and took pride in her clothes, her cooking, her manicured nails, and her ironed hair. Hinds lived with her boyfriend, Radcliffe (Mickey) Freeman, and their two children, eleven-year-old Nikeita and eight-year-old Mickey, Jr. Their apartment was on the ground floor of Building Two, just north of Coke’s headquarters, in the area of Tivoli known as Java. Freeman had been working in the U.S. when, in April, Hinds asked him to return home. Freeman had played on the same street-corner soccer team as Coke when they were children, but their lives followed very different paths. From 2007 to 2008, Freeman worked on the completion of a new U.S. Embassy compound in Kingston, a job that required his name to be checked against lists of known criminals maintained by the Jamaican police. Contractors in Kingston and the United States knew him to be a hardworking carpenter and a family man.

That day in May, Hinds thought about leaving Tivoli, but she told herself that anyone who fled would have to live with the shame of having abandoned the community. Neighbors might label her an informer. She also didn’t think that the security forces would actually enter. Hinds told a friend who was worried about an invasion, “Tivoli is the baddest place in the whole wide world.”

On Monday, May 24th, Hinds woke to the sound of sporadic gunfire. Freeman was gone. Hinds anxiously dialled his cell phone and reached him at the house of a friend named Hugh Scully, who lived nearby. Freeman was calm, and Hinds, who had not been outside for three days, assumed that it was safe to go and buy food.

Late in the morning, she left her flat. It was a clear day, and the trade winds coming off the harbor eased the sun’s dizzying heat. A white surveillance plane was circling Kingston; a blue seal on the tail identified it as belonging to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Armored personnel carriers and soldiers from the Army, or Jamaica Defence Force, and the police, or Jamaica Constabulary Force, were massing to the south and east, outside the ring of barricades.

At 11 A.M., gunfire erupted as the security forces breached the barricades. Everyone in the street around Building Two scrambled for cover. Many ran to the ground-floor flat of an elderly woman named Murline Campbell, Hinds’s neighbor. (“When they come to my house, they are all family,” Campbell said later.) Suddenly, a J.D.F. helicopter appeared overhead, and Hinds was struck by an explosion. Her yellow shorts were charred black and her hip and buttocks were severely burned. She fell in the middle of the street, and blood flowed from gashes on her legs and face.

A neighbor ran to Scully’s house, where Freeman was tending to a young man who had been injured in an explosion nearby. “Marjorie dead!” he cried. Freeman found Hinds lying unconscious where she had fallen. He picked her up and rushed to Campbell’s apartment, where his daughter was hiding under Campbell’s bed. Freeman laid Hinds down on the floor with her head resting in his lap. She came to for a moment and asked for water, and Campbell brought some. The men sat silently in chairs. The women cracked open the windows and peeked out into the street. The gunfire seemed to be getting closer.

Four or five hours later, Campbell’s door was kicked down and about ten soldiers burst into the apartment. They carried M-16 assault rifles and wore the camouflage uniforms of the Army. They had yellow “Police Line” tape tied around their arms. The soldiers carried Hinds out to a jeep, which took her to Kingston Public Hospital.

At around four o’clock, the soldiers led the rest of the apartment’s occupants to a shaded area between the building and the street. On a normal day, young men would gather there to sit in high wooden chairs, play dice, and smoke marijuana. One soldier walked around with a plastic bag, collecting cell phones. Campbell’s daughter, Ayoni, remembers the soldiers punching and kicking the men and older boys. Nikeita began to cry. “What kind of work you do, man?” one soldier asked Freeman, whose shirt was stained with Hinds’s blood. “Me a carpenter, officer,” he replied.

Soldiers told Freeman and three other men to stay where they were; everyone else was ordered to walk a few hundred feet to a street called Sangster Crescent. Nikeita remembers seeing her father sitting peacefully under a tree in the custody of soldiers and a few policemen. She walked on with the rest of the group to Sangster Crescent, where hundreds of residents sat on the pavement as gunshots continued to echo.

After sundown, Nikeita was released. She returned to Building Two but was unable to find her father. She spent the night at a neighbor’s flat. The next morning, she encountered a soldier whom she recognized from Campbell’s apartment. He was stocky, she says, with a dark complexion and a wrinkled face. “Hey, your father is the short man?” he asked, in a voice that seemed to her full of contempt and satisfaction. “Your father dead, you know.”