Carisa Lee

The coun­try’s mur­der count last night crossed the 500 mark with the killings of two peo­ple on La­dy Chan­cel­lor Hill on Fri­day evening.

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 6:45 pm po­lice re­ceived a call about a white Nis­san Syl­phy parked at the bot­tom of the Hill, with two dead male oc­cu­pants in­side.

The oc­cu­pants were a 15-year-old boy and his fa­ther.

They suf­fered sev­er­al gun­shot wounds to the head and were found slumped in the front seats of the ve­hi­cle.

The bod­ies were dis­cov­ered by jog­gers who opened the ve­hi­cle af­ter they no­ticed the en­gine run­ning and the glass frost­ed. The killings pushed the mur­der toll to 501.

The mur­der count stood at 497 at the start of yes­ter­day but rose with the killing of 37-year-old Win­ston Richards of Pa­lo Seco who was gunned down at his home yes­ter­day morn­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports po­lice, around 6:50 am Richards was out­side his Beach Road home when three men emerged from bush­es near­by and fired sev­er­al shots at him. He ran to the back of his home where he col­lapsed and died.

That took the count up to 498.

It rose to 499, when po­lice clas­si­fied a de­com­posed body found in Cedar Hill, Arou­ca on Wednes­day, as a mur­der.

He was iden­ti­fied as Joey Melville.

Po­lice be­lieve that he may have been killed around mid­night on Wednes­day as res­i­dents re­port­ed­ly heard gun­shots in the area. The of­fi­cers found Melville’s body un­der a tree.

In the last five years, Trinidad and To­ba­go’s mur­der count passed 500 just once with 516 mur­ders in 2018. The on­ly oth­er time it crossed the 500 marks was in 2008 when 550 per­sons were mur­dered.