Jensen La Vende

Some 228 peo­ple have been mur­dered in the first six months of the year, ac­cord­ing to Homi­cide Bu­reau of In­ves­ti­ga­tions. This fig­ure is 28 more than for the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od last year.

The most re­cent vic­tim was An­der­son Gomez who was killed on Wednes­day night mo­ments af­ter he got in­to a ar­gu­ment with a group of men over a roulette ma­chine game.

Po­lice said Gomez, of Ma­tu­ri­ta Ex­ten­sion, Ari­ma, was killed af­ter gun­men am­bushed him around 10.30 pm in the car park of the Big Yard Recre­ation Club. He was shot sev­er­al times by his at­tack­ers and col­lapsed and died at the scene.

Po­lice said they knew of no mo­tive for his shoot­ing since he was not known to them. How­ev­er, they be­lieve it may be tied to an ar­gu­ment he had with some men over a roulette ma­chine in the recre­ation club.

While the Homi­cide Bu­reau places the mur­der tal­ly at 228, the me­dia tal­ly had the toll up to yes­ter­day six short of the po­lice fig­ures.

In sta­tis­tics com­piled from me­dia re­ports by the Pow­er­ful Ladies of T&T (PLOTT), of the 222 mur­ders tal­lied by the me­dia, Gomez was the 203rd male vic­tim for the year. So far 19 women have been killed. Guns have been used in most of the mur­ders, to the tune of 76.6 per cent, fol­lowed by knives and oth­er sharp ob­jects at 13 per cent.

Blunt force trau­ma, burn­ing, stran­gu­la­tion and oth­er fac­tors, where no cause of death was de­ter­mined but of­fi­cials are sure death was not nat­ur­al, ac­count for 10.1 per cent of the oth­er mur­ders record­ed.Port-of-Spain and En­vi­rons has seen a dras­tic re­duc­tion in mur­ders while the West­ern Di­vi­sion saw an in­crease in the last month.

Killers have used the cov­er of dark­ness to pounce on their vic­tims. Of the re­port­ed 222 mur­ders, the ma­jor­i­ty have been com­mit­ted at or around 10 pm. Time fluc­tu­ate be­tween 10 pm and 2 am for the oth­er killings.

Of the 222 killed, 82 were be­tween the ages of 26-35, 55 were un­der 25, some 35 were in the 36-45 brack­et and the re­main­der were ei­ther above 45 or there was no age giv­en for the vic­tim due to the in­abil­i­ty of the po­lice to do so.

With the re­port­ed 222 mur­ders and 182 days passed for the year, there is an av­er­age of 1.22 mur­ders each day and with 184 more days be­fore the year ends, the mur­der toll, if left un­abat­ed, may climb to 446.48 with an ac­tu­al body count round­ing it off at 446.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian on Wednes­day, head of the Homi­cide Bu­reau, Snr Supt Zamsheed Mo­hammed, said his men have been do­ing much with very lit­tle.

He called for a DNA data­base which would help with he mur­der de­tec­tion and in­crease it from 17.3 per cent to close to the 30 per cent min­i­mum bench­mark set out by act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Stephen Williams.