Senior Reporter
anna-lisa.paul@guardian.co.tt
Police and soldiers are maintaining a high visibility at Phase I, Powder Magazine, Cocorite, and neighbouring streets five days after the mass shooting which claimed the lives of four men and left eight others injured.
Residents said the fear that it could happen again is enough to keep them locked in their homes. The usually bustling apartment compound was deserted yesterday.
Speaking through a half-opened window, a 19-year-old man who was shot twice in the left foot, said the deaths of the four men will haunt him for the rest of his life.
He said he was still in shock and dazed.
“It was after 10 pm, the normal Saturday night you know, just liming and breezing, what we does do every day,” he recalled.
“It have men selling drinks, a person selling barbeque, gambling, drinking, smoking, and suddenly I just start to hear shots. I was talking to a person and look up and see two men in black, kinda get stunned and I turn and start to run, seeing the wall mashing up, mashing up.
“I see my bredrin running in front of me and just drop down and the only thing that was coming to my mind was to just reach in the corridor. As my friend drop, my foot start to hurt one time.”
The young man said he ran into a friend’s apartment and it was only then he realised he had been shot twice in the left foot.
He said he had been at the front of the apartment complex where the burger cart was located as he was supporting his former classmate and friend, Shaquille Ottley, who had only started selling cold drinks there two days before.
“It real hard ... he had real plans,” he said. “He now start doing his thing on Thursday come straight down to the Saturday night. That is what really had me up there because I was supporting him in he thing.”
A female relative who sat close by, said, “We have no fight here for no turf. These men were in nothing.”
Touching the red and white rosary beads hanging from her neck, she insisted, “It have no war up here ... no war, no war, no war!”
The two insisted that Shaquille Ottley, 22, Sadiki Ottley, 31, Jonathan Osmond, 36, and Antonio Jack, 57, were innocent bystanders.
A resident who has lived in the area for seven years expressed shock at the killings.
“I have never experienced something of this magnitude, it is actually horrifying. You would have the normal squabble among the local boys but nothing like this,” she said.