Casan­dra Thomp­son�Forbes

To­ba­go po­lice are prob­ing the is­land's third mur­der for 2017.

Dead is Ju­nior 'Cop­per' Roberts, 34, of Buc­coo New Road, Buc­coo.

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports, Roberts was dri­ving his sil­ver grey Nis­san Almera east along Auchenskeoch Road, Buc­coo, around 9.35 pm on Sun­day when sev­er­al gun­shots were heard. The ve­hi­cle lat­er spun out of con­trol and ran off the road­way in­to some bush­es.

Roberts was tak­en out the ve­hi­cle and placed on the pave­ment by passers-by and of­fi­cers from the Old Grange Po­lice Sta­tion were called. He was rushed to the Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal in a po­lice ve­hi­cle, but suc­cumbed to his in­juries while un­der­go­ing emer­gency surgery around 10.20 pm. He was re­port­ed­ly shot three times in his chest.

Po­lice said Roberts had a pend­ing drug mat­ter be­fore the court.

A po­lice al­so re­vealed Roberts' death may be con­nect­ed to the 2016 mur­der of Za­ki Lorde and the Jan­u­ary 5, 2017, mur­der of Kurt "Tibbs" Clarke, both of Lam­beau. It is al­leged that both Clarke and Roberts were as­so­ciates of Za­ki Lorde and their death may be linked.

At his Buc­coo home yes­ter­day, Roberts' fa­ther, Al­bert, de­scribed his son as a lov­ing child, adding he is yet to un­der­stand why some­one would want to harm his son. "My son used to re­al en­joy him­self, lime plen­ty, go to work, make his mon­ey and come back home. The most thing I could tell you about my son, I feel they kill my son be­cause of some jeal­ousy or en­vy or some­thing," the old­er Roberts said.

He said, how­ev­er, that has to be strong for his three grand chil­dren fol­low­ing the death of their fa­ther. He said he hopes his son's killers will be found, as the crime sit­u­a­tion in the coun­try was get­ting out of hand.

"The crime sit­u­a­tion is very bad. It have plen­ty guns on the street, I'm hop­ing that things change and things get dif­fer­ent, be­cause it is scary. Trinidad and To­ba­go to me is scary, be­cause every day you hear some­body dead with some kind of gun-re­lat­ed in­jury, I read the news­pa­pers every day, but I nev­er re­al­ly ex­pect­ed it to hit home," Roberts said.