Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Head of the Homi­cide Bu­reau of In­ves­ti­ga­tions, Snr Supt Rishi Singh, is urg­ing the pub­lic to be mind­ful and use their dis­cre­tion on who they choose to in­vite to their homes or to so­cial events.

Singh made the call af­ter Ke­ston Lawrence, Dwayne Charles and Fran­cis Munroe were gunned down at a wake at the cor­ner of Or­ange Field Road and Per­se­ver­ance Road in Cara­pichaima around 12.30 am yes­ter­day.

Hours lat­er, at around 2.15 am, Jessie Bap­tiste, 22, was gunned down while two oth­ers were wound­ed dur­ing a birth­day par­ty in North­east­ern Set­tle­ment, San­gre Grande.

Con­tact­ed for com­ment yes­ter­day, Singh said ini­tial in­ves­ti­ga­tions sug­gest­ed the mur­ders were un­re­lat­ed. How­ev­er, he stressed the need for peo­ple to be care­ful about who they in­vit­ed to at­tend cer­tain events.

He not­ed that guests should al­so be mind­ful about what kind of com­pa­ny they kept and keep their dis­tance from peo­ple they felt lived dan­ger­ous lifestyles.

Singh said invit­ing peo­ple who were in­volved in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties to an event could al­so en­dan­ger the lives of oth­er guests.

“Some per­sons live vul­ner­a­ble lifestyles and when I say vul­ner­a­ble lifestyles, (I mean) per­sons who, by virtue of their own ac­tions, in­vite oth­er el­e­ments to tar­get them for one rea­son or the oth­er.

“But be­cause of prob­a­ble in­volve­ment in gang ac­tiv­i­ty and that type of thing, when you have an event and you have these types of per­sons, you ac­tu­al­ly ex­pose every­body who at­tends the event to the reck­less­ness and bad in­ten­tions of in­di­vid­u­als who tar­get these per­sons, be­cause these per­sons are gen­er­al­ly in­dis­crim­i­nate when they tar­get. It’s un­for­tu­nate that this is the cur­rent re­al­i­ty that we have to deal with.”

Singh al­so sug­gest­ed that per­sons no­ti­fy their near­est po­lice sta­tions if they in­tend­ed to have an event, so that of­fi­cers would be aware and take the nec­es­sary steps to en­sure the pro­tec­tion of guests.

“We might choose to pay par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion with pa­trols once it comes to our at­ten­tion, be­cause we want to ho­n­our the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty we have to all our cit­i­zens,” he said.