by An­na-Lisa Paul

The Po­lice Com­plaints Au­thor­i­ty (PCA) has ini­ti­at­ed an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the lat­est po­lice killing which left two Mor­vant men dead fol­low­ing a con­fronta­tion on Tues­day.

The men were iden­ti­fied as Ri­val­do 'Sleepy' White, 19, and Isa­iah “Ack­bar” James, 20.

Of­fi­cers from the North East­ern Di­vi­sion were con­duct­ing an­ti-crime ex­er­cis­es along Chrysan­the­mum Dri­ve, Mor­vant, around 11.40 am on De­cem­ber 6 when they al­leged­ly en­tered a home to car­ry out a search.

It was re­port­ed that as of­fi­cers en­tered, they saw two men with firearms.

It is al­leged that White fired at the of­fi­cers, even as James at­tempt­ed to flee the scene by jump­ing out a win­dow on the first floor.

The of­fi­cers re­turned fire in keep­ing with the TTPS’s Use of Force Pol­i­cy and hit White who then col­lapsed.

As the of­fi­cers chased James, he re­port­ed­ly shot at law­men, who again re­turned fire, hit­ting him sev­er­al times.

White and James were both tak­en to the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, where they suc­cumbed to their in­juries.

Two firearms were re­port­ed­ly re­cov­ered at the scene of the shoot­ing.

Al­though res­i­dents dis­put­ed the cir­cum­stances lead­ing to the shoot­ings and de­nied both men were armed, the PCA said they had not re­ceived any of­fi­cial let­ters up to yes­ter­day, from the men’s rel­a­tives in con­nec­tion with the shoot­ings.

The killings of White and James brought the num­ber of po­lice-in­volved killings to 51 for the year so far.