(Trinidad Express) A SIXTEEN-year-old boy who walked out his grandmother’s home to get bread and sausages for dinner was gunned down near his Laventille home on Friday night and his $1,500 cellphone taken.
Police believe he was killed for the phone.
Police said Akil Phillip, of Rebecca Trace, Block 22, Laventille, was found face down in the yard outside his home about 9.30 p.m. after residents heard a series of gunshots.
Phillip, a pupil of St Anthony’s College in Diego Martin, had been shot three times.
The boy’s relatives called police and the ambulance service, but after 15 minutes, Phillip’s uncle, also named Akil, took him to the Port of Spain General Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
Speaking with the Sunday Express at their home, Phillip’s grandmother Cinty Vaughans said neither she nor her family could understand why he was killed.
She said: “He just went in the shop to get some bread and sausage, and while I was inside laying down, I heard ‘bap, bap’ and then I heard my grandson scream out, and after that, all I hear is people running through our area by the back of our house.”
She said she called her son, Phillip’s uncle.
Vaughans said: “He ran out first and he said, ‘Yes, mammy, look him on the ground here lie down’. He was face down, bleeding through his mouth, and we turned him over on his right side and I saw three bullet wounds, including one to his stomach.”
She said she and her son tried to stop the flow the blood while other relatives contacted the police and ambulance service.
First to go to college
“Football, food and intelligence…that was Akil,” said Vaughans when asked about her grandson.
She said: “My grandson is the first one to go to a college, and he always told me, ‘Granny, I am going to give you all eight subjects’.”
“He was in Form Three and he was not a bad student, according to his teachers, because just about sometime ago, his father went to the school to collect an award for him,” she said.
Vaughans wore her grandson’s school shirt over her clothes as she spoke to reporters yesterday.
She said: “If he was in anything bad, I as his grandmother (would have been the first to) take him to the police station, and I don’t care if he hated me when he got older.
“He always wanted to be a fireman, but then a few days ago, he asked me to give him a few months to decide because he had changed his mind.
Worked to buy phone
“After they killed him, his phone was nowhere to be found and a dog went with the bread and sausage,” the grieving grandmother added.
She said over the Christmas period last year, he worked during his holidays helping labourers build a second house for her, and she paid him for his labour.
She said his mother gave him the rest of the money for the phone, which he gave to himself as a Christmas present.
A team of officers from the Homicide Bureau, including PC Garcia, WPC Massiah, PC Jorsling, visited the scene.
Investigations into the 124th murder for the year are ongoing.
