(Trinidad Express) “Are you insinuating for one minute that if the police are attacked they should turn their back and run?”
That was the response of National Security Minister John Sandy yesterday when asked about the killing of three men from Santa Cruz by the police on Saturday.
Sandy was at the Remembrance Day commemoration at Memorial Park, Port of Spain and said he didn’t want to comment further on the issue, stating that he would let the investigative process take its course.
Relatives of the three men, however, continued their demands for justice.
Fearing incarceration if they protested, they held a small gathering along Gasparillo Road, Santa Cruz and vented their anger about the shooting.
The three men killed by police were Nkosi Borde, 28; Nigel Eminess, 21; and Hayden Honore, 31. They lived near one another along La Sargasse Road, Santa Cruz.
Police said that around 1 a.m. on Saturday they responded to a report of robbery and shooting at Rich Gold Bar in Chase Village and were given a description of the two vehicles the men had fled the scene in.
Officers said they spotted the car heading north along Uriah Butler Highway and a high-speed chase and shootout ensued.
Two other friends the Santa Cruz men were said to be liming with that night are currently at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, while another is at the Chaguanas Police Station.
Interviewed yesterday, relatives of the six men claimed they had gone out to lime to celebrate the lifting of curfew restrictions in the country, when they got into an altercation with a group of men who attempted to rob one of them at the bar in Chase Village.
The men’s friends and relatives asked if these six men were bandits, how come no-one has yet come forward to claim the jewelry they allegedly stole.
One of the men won the Play Whe mark twice that day and had a total of TT$3,000 in his possession.
A close friend of the six men, Kwame Johnson, recalled a phone call he had with one of the men currently in hospital.
He said: “When the men and them call me they say is bandit shoot them up, but at that time them fellas didn’t know three men dead in the next vehicle, so I told them I can’t come down there, but I called my cousin who is a police, but really and truly at that time I did not know is police who was shooting them.”
“After I receive a call from a person saying is police who shoot them men, but the thing is when I was talking to the men and them they say is an unmarked vehicle pull alongside them and start to spray them down and them thinking was bandit,” Johnson added.
He said that had the three other men not hidden in the bushes they may have been killed as well.
Nigel Eminess’s sister, Darisha Eminess, broke down as she spoke.
“My mother in the hospital since 6 a.m. on Saturday because if you see how my brother looked. My brother didn’t used to do nobody nothing. They riddled my brother with bullets in the back because as I see the body bag I start to bawl. My brother looked like he was sleepin, but when the woman turn my brother back if yuh see bullets”.
Darisha Eminess continued: “My li’l son stand up and watch the body and said ‘mammy, tell uncle to get up’. Them rob me of my brother, them is the thief and them is the robbers because them robbin people of they life.”
