(Original Link)

By Ivan Pereira
Thursday, December 10, 2009

The search for a missing Rosedale mother who vanished after dropping her only daughter off at school ended violently after the father of her child strangled her to death and abandoned her body in a Long Island street, police said.

Marvon Jemmott, 35, of 231 St. in Rosedale, was awaiting arraignment in First District Court in Hempstead, L.I., Wednesday afternoon on a second-degree murder charge in the death of his ex-girlfriend Jamaica Smith, Nassau County police said. Smith, 36, was reported missing from her home the day before Thanksgiving and her body was found Monday morning outside an abandoned home on Krull Street in Uniondale, L.I., according to police.

Smith’s older sister, Vernita Vereen, said she and her kin had prayed that the single mother would be found alive and held onto their hope alive even when reports surfaced that she was killed in Long Island.

“We’re going to identify a body right and see if it’s her. We hope it isn’t,” Vereen said Tuesday just hours before she went to confirm the death with the authorities.

A Nassau meter agent spotted the body on the curb of the street around 8:45 a.m. Monday, according to police. The body was in front of an unoccupied home, police said.

The Nassau County Medical Examiner’s office said Smith was strangled to death. Her family knew that her disappearance the day before Thanksgiving was suspicious, according to Vereen.

Smith, who recently moved back to Rosedale from Tennessee and was living with her niece, never left for long without informing her close friends or relatives since she has been raising her young daughter by herself, according to Vereen.

“She wouldn’t leave without her daughter, she wouldn’t leave her family,” Vereen said.

The sibling said Smith was last seen dropping off her daughter at PS 156 in Laurelton. Smith was a private beautician who worked at her clients’ homes, according to Vereen.

Police did not name a motive for the killing.

In a statement released late Tuesday, City Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-St. Albans) offered his condolences to the family, who came to his office for help when Smith was missing.

“Like many community members who joined their efforts to find Jamaica, I am terribly disappointed with this outcome,” he said.