(Trinidad Guardian) A lumberer by trade, Bryan Felix, 40, was asked by his neighbour Aleem Khan, 50, on Friday to help cut down some logs and build up a wooden structure on a parcel of land in Cumuto.
The pair, who both lived off the Cumuto Main Road in Coryal Village, returned home on Friday evening, having completed some work.
On Saturday, they went back out with the same intentions.
However, they never returned home.
Villagers from their community conducted searches to find the two men— Khan a father of two, and Felix a father of one.
But their search ended in tragedy yesterday morning when the bodies of the two men were both found near where they were last seen.
Police told the Guardian Media that at 7 am yesterday, Sgt Williams and a party of officers from the Cumuto Police Station received information that two bodies were found at Sin Verguenza Road, Coryal Village.
The officers went to a bushy area approximately a quarter mile off the northern side of the roadway where they observed two male bodies lying in the bushes with what appeared to be gunshot wounds to their heads.
The wounds appeared to have been made by a shotgun.
The bodies were viewed by a district medical officer and ordered removed from the scene at about 1.15 pm.
An autopsy is expected to be performed today at the Forensic Science Center to confirm what caused their deaths.
When the Guardian visited Coryal Village, yesterday, relatives and friends of the two men had gathered in their numbers to pay their final respects.
The overarching consensus at the two wakes, was shock.
No one understood why this had happened.
“When we woke up this morning we weren’t expecting to hear this, nah. We were expecting to hear maybe they got lost or something. But not this,” Guardian Media was told by one villager.
Felix, relatives said, was married and had one daughter.
He was a lumberer all his life, trained in the field by his father.
They said that the 40-year-old was a loving, kind, caring and considerate man.
“Any adjective you can think of besides being bad, that would describe Felix. That was the type of man he was,” relatives said.
When asked why anyone would want the 40-year-old man dead, relatives were baffled.
“He wasn’t in anything. We don’t know what happened here. The most we can say is we heard there was a disagreement over the same land that they were working on, but to say it would lead to murder… I can’t say,” relatives said.
In their sorrow, Khan’s relatives gave similar comments.
“The most we can say is that my father got land from his father, and it was only recently properly placed under his name. Now that individual started to grade it down and thing and asked my father if he could make a small roadway through my dad’s land. My dad told him go ahead. However, the road got bigger and bigger, and then was coming too much into my dad’s land, and he said ‘boy, you have to stop that’. That is the only thing I can think of. But I don’t know if that is linked. But my dad was just such a quiet man, we just are struggling trying to figure out how this happened,” Guardian Media was told.
Khan’s wife died less than two months ago after her appendix ruptured.
Khan’s untimely death has plunged his family and the rest of the village into deeper mourning.
