While many parents and pupils received their SEA results yesterday, there was no excitement for the relatives of 12-year-old Levi Lewis.
They were robbed of sharing that special milestone with him, after he and his mother, Abeo Cudjoe, were stabbed and chopped to death at their Penal home on May 10.
Levi’s principal Lynn Moodie said she cried after she collected his results on Friday. He passed for his third choice, Penal Secondary.
Several relatives turned up at St Dominic’s RC School, which is being housed at the Penal Central Community Centre, yesterday morning to collect results but Levi’s relatives were not among them.
Asked how she felt collecting his results, the principal told reporters, “I was in tears just now.”
She said Levi’s uncle called her around 6.30 am to find out how he did. While she expected better results from Levi, she said in the last two terms she noticed his performance had dropped and his personality had changed.
“He wasn’t the child that we knew. He used to be bubbly. He was still like that when he came out to school but you know there was an underlying thing and I remember when they were practising for graduation, I was watching and saying if Levi was in the line-up.
“I sit down in the church with the kids, I say if Levi was in the line-up he would not have been listening. How they walking, he would have been interfering with somebody in the line but that was the child he was.”
She recalled that he was the youngest player on their football team.
“We were in the national team, we came second, we would have been representing CONCACAF but we missed it by that, on the last game.
Moodie recalled that at their graduation, they honoured Levi and presented his father with a photograph of him and his football team when they received their medals at that game, as well as a football with their signatures.
“Again, I was choking up because the whole graduation, the parents, the teachers, the graduates were crying...”
In a brief telephone interview, Levi’s father Neil Lewis said when his son wrote the SEA exam on March 31, he never thought that he would not be here to collect the results.
However, he was happy that Levi passed for a school of his choice. Had Levi been alive, the father said he would have taken him for pizza or KFC or even to the mall, “whatever he would have wanted.”
While no one has been charged in connection with the murders, Lewis said he was leaving everything in God’s hands.
Despite the challenges with the school and COVID-19, Moodie said the results were pretty good. Out of the 40 students who sat the exam, 20 passed for seven-year schools and 17 passed for five-year schools but three children will have to resit the exam.