It’s been al­most one week since life­guards Hol­lis and Shireen Valdez were mur­dered at their Rin­con, Las Cuevas home and fel­low life­guards are yet to re­ceive an of­fer of coun­selling from the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty.

Say­ing the life­guards op­er­at­ing at the Mara­cas Bay and Las Cuevas beach­es are a small, close-knit group who have been acute­ly af­fect­ed by the sud­den loss and the cir­cum­stances which led to the deaths, An­tho­ny Paul yes­ter­day said they were all trau­ma­tised in some way.

Hol­lis, 41 and Shireen, 40, were shot dead at their home on Ju­ly 29 by 34-year-old Franklyn Clement, who had been in­volved in an on/off-again re­la­tion­ship with Shireen for sev­er­al years.

Clement’s de­com­pos­ing body was found along a hik­ing trail in Rin­con on Mon­day.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day, Clement, the Na­tion­al Union of Gov­ern­ment and Fed­er­at­ed Work­ers shop-stew­ard for the Mara­cas Bay sec­tion, said the loss was par­tic­u­lar­ly painful for him, as they all trained to­geth­er.

“We came in­to the life­guard ser­vice at the same time. This has shak­en the en­tire life­guard ser­vice. It was a big, big shock­er for all of us. And I thought the min­istry would have sent up a coun­sel­lor to give some kind of sup­port to the work­ers, but we haven’t seen any­thing like that hap­pen­ing or tak­ing place. Every­body here does live like fam­i­ly.”

Not­ing the se­vere life­guard short­age cur­rent­ly ex­ist­ing, Paul agreed the deaths would place ad­di­tion­al stress on the re­sources at the Las Cuevas beach—which is where the cou­ple was as­signed.

Un­able to speak about the re­sources at that fa­cil­i­ty, how­ev­er, Paul said while they con­tin­ue to op­er­ate with less than op­ti­mum man­pow­er ca­pac­i­ty, they are mak­ing the best of a sit­u­a­tion the min­istry is aware off.

He said last week­end’s ros­ter had eight peo­ple as­signed to work and the com­ing week­end has six, adding with some out on va­ca­tion, it just was not ide­al. A to­tal of 21 life­guards ro­tat­ed on a two-shift sys­tem are cur­rent­ly as­signed to Mara­cas Bay.

“We have sev­en posts to man at Mara­cas and we are look­ing at two life­guards to a post…plus when Tyri­co was op­er­at­ing, we used to send two life­guards over there,” Paul said.

As a re­sult of the acute staff short­age and di­lap­i­dat­ed con­di­tions of the life­guard fa­cil­i­ties at Tyri­co, that beach has been with­out a life­guard ser­vice for more than two and a half years.

De­spite this, beach­go­ers con­tin­ue to flock there and Paul cau­tioned, “Any­body bathing at Tyri­co con­tin­ues to do so at their own risk.”

Mean­while, beach­go­ers to Mara­cas Bay are ad­vised that due to on­go­ing in­dus­tri­al ac­tion by the life­guards, they on­ly op­er­ate from 10 am to 12 noon on a Sat­ur­day and Sun­day.