Guyana: police dig up a rotting corpse from a shallow grave; they think it's the body of Dominic Bernard, a 19-year-old from Britain with Guyanese roots. He travelled there last year, a couple of thousand pounds in his pocket, to visit his godbrother.
Nassau: a 23-year-old woman is charged with killing her father, a College of the Bahamas lecturer.
Belize: two taxi drivers are shot dead in a single weekend.
Jamaica: the body of a ten-year-old boy is found in a shallow grave, his throat slashed. His severed arm has been buried separately. Police hold two women and a man; neighbouring villagers talk of witchcraft.
It has been a bad month for murders. In T&T, there were 31 killed in the first 19 days of 2016, up from 24 in the same period last year. If that daily rate is maintained–which it almost certainly won't be–we would have a full-year body count close to 600.
But let's get these murder numbers into perspective. It's time for a listicle. Six shots.
Shot one: this is a Caribbean-wide story, not a local one.
T&T's per capita murder rate last year was 31 per 100,000 population. Other countries in the English-speaking Caribbean fare worse. And we're not just talking Jamaica, with its per capita rate of 44 per 100k. Up there too are the Bahamas (39 per 100k), Belize (35), and St Kitts-Nevis (33.)
Peaceful little Barbados had a murder rate of 11 per 100k last year. That's fair enough by Caribbean standards–but it's around ten times that of most European countries. Too many Barbados killings bear all the hallmarks we're used to–young guy, shot dead, bad area, robbery not the motive.
Shot two: changes of government have little impact.
In the Bahamas, Perry Christie won the 2012 election after blaming his predecessor for the country's murder rate. Last year, under his watch, Bahamian murders hit an all-time high.
Here in T&T, the UNC's fan base got themselves all excited when the murder count blipped upwards after the September election. It wasn't clear what dire PNM missteps could have pushed up killings within days of the poll–but blood was apparently on their hands. Then that trend reversed.
A bit of quick maths gives the murder count for the last three months of 2015; there were 89 killings. So that's a monthly average just under 30.
For the months of 2015 when Kamla was in office–January to August–murders averaged almost 35 per month. The body count rose from 30 in January to 43 in July and 40 in August.
Indeed, taking her full term, Kamla Persad-Bissessar presided over a higher monthly murder rate than any other prime minister, before or since.
With murders averaging below 30 in the last three months of 2015, I can't remember a spate of commentary congratulating Edmund Dillon on the falling murder stats. Which makes sense. A deadly burst of gangland politics burnt itself out, with no special input from his ministry. And this month, we're back in trouble.
Shot three: don't get excited about year-to-year fluctuations.
T&T's yearly body count has been flat since 2013, at just over 400. That's not true elsewhere.
In Belize, murders dipped by one-third in 2013. Locals applauded precinct-based policing and well-run labour-intensive construction schemes. But Belize is now pretty much back to where it was.
A year ago, Jamaica was celebrating a 16 per cent decline in murders for 2014. That was thrown sharply into reverse last year; the murder count went back up, by 21 per cent.
Shot four: it's worse in the mainland Hispanic countries. In Venezuela, nobody keeps a good official count on murders; but unofficial data crunchers estimate 27,878 from 2015. That would be a rate of 92 per 100,000–almost three times T&T's.
El Salvador beats that, with 6,657 murders; that's 105 per 100,000.
Shot five: don't kid yourself with "it's just the same everywhere."
European countries with no death penalty have much lower murder rates than the Caribbean. There were 574 murders in England and Wales last year. That's less than half as many as Jamaica–and in a country with more than 20 times Jamaica's population.
Shot six: there's no simple link to poverty. In impoverished Guyana, the murder rate is less than half that of the prosperous Bahamas.
But we have to watch out. T&T's economy is in deep, deep trouble. Plenty of people have lost their jobs, and plenty more have not been paid for work completed.
T&T's murder rate soared through the boom years, when most of us prospered. Most killings were linked to gang conflict or drug disputes.
The guns are here, and so are the gang structures. All is in place for an upward spurt in violent property crime. If that happens, we'll see a further uptick in the murder rate–and young guys from Laventille will not be the only casualties.