(Trinidad Guardian) Although 2022 is now officially the bloodiest year on record in T&T’s history with the murder toll hitting 555, acting Police Commissioner Mc Donald Jacob says this still does not warrant implementing a limited State of Emergency (SoE).
He made the comment while speaking with reporters at the scene of a triple murder in Laventille on Tuesday morning, where he appealed to relatives of the dead men who might be considering exacting revenge to let the authorities do their job and apprehend the killers.
Arriving at Sapodilla Trace, Snake Valley, Laventille, shortly after Cody Pierre, Jevon George and Alex Morton were shot by gunmen as they stood on the road, Jacob agreed the scene depicted not just the loss being experienced by three mothers, but also a community’s pain, anger and frustration.
Pierre, 24, of Mapp Lands, Laventille; George, 23, of Sapodilla Trace, Laventille; and Morton, of Red Hill, Morvant, were standing on the road talking around 9 am when gunmen opened fire on the group.
Pierre and George died on the spot, while Morton was taken to the Port-of-Spain General Hospital, where he died around 9.45 am.
As tears rolled down her face, Pierre’s mother Debra Clunis-Pierre trembled with shock as she looked at her son’s body lying on the ground.
Comforted by one of her other sons who barely uttered a word, she said he had spent the night at her house and had just come outside “to get a smoke.”
“He just come to buy his goods as usual,” she said.
She said she heard the gunshots during the attack. “It was plenty…I was just praying that it wasn’t my son,” she added.
Denying Pierre was involved in any criminal activities, Clunis-Pierre said, “Cody always in a home, either by me or his girlfriend, or he gone to work. Cody don’t be in this life.”
She said she had cautioned her children enough against “the life.”
“He used to laugh and talk with everybody.”
Pierre had been employed as a janitor at a primary school in the area.
Describing George as similar in nature to Pierre, in that he would hail everyone in the neighbourhood, Clunis-Pierre said they were two good, decent, young men.
Commenting on the crime situation, she urged gun-toting youths, “Stop this stupidness they doing, as all this unnecessary crime ain’t call for.”
She said they were distressing and disrupting life for many residents who had to go work and school. “They bussing shots all hours of the morning and night,” she noted.
She struggled to make sense of the killings saying: “These is people who grow up with one another. Children who grow with one another, go to school with one another…why it hadda reach this far? Why allyuh hadda make stupid people make allyuh reach this far?”
An elderly man said Laventille had been a peaceful place 10 years ago, but this changed when the guns started to flow into the “ghetto.”
Clunis-Pierre dropped her head and lowered her voice, saying: “It scary now,” adding, “A whole setta duncy-head and uneducated children just playing the fool with it. They wouldn’t go and learn their work but they will pick up a gun normal, normal, normal.”
Asked if the killings would drive her out of Laventille, she said yes.
CoP: Don’t take revenge, let police act
Sympathising with the grieving relatives yesterday as he offered condolences following the murders, Jacob warned against exacting revenge as he assured, “We the police will do our part.”
Revealing he had seen the need for revenge reflected in the eyes and on the face of a relative of one of the deceased men, the commissioner said, “I tried my best to convince him not to go in that direction because what we are having in these instances, is a lot of revenge and retaliation when these things occur.”
Yesterday’s triple killings took the number of such to four; with 37 double murders; and two quadruple murders for the year so far.
