MAY PEN, Jamaica (AP) — It’s been nearly a year since Sevina Giderisingh’s 20-year-old son died in a confrontation with a police officer on the dusty outskirts of this struggling Jamaican city where jobs are scarce and crime abounds.

The only explanation she’s gotten from detectives in gritty May Pen is that an officer shot her eldest son in self-defense one afternoon last June after he was accused of stealing a taxi. But she says a witness told a starkly different story: Her slender son, Alphanso, was unarmed and on his knees begging for his life when he was shot.