Maxine Cameron-Bacchus still lives in the house where her mother and stepfather were murdered. She hid under the bed that night when gunmen invaded their Agricola home sprayed it with bullets. At the end of the attack 74-year-old David Brummel, 73-year-old Hannah Cameron, and her grandson Fenton Rudder were dead.
Three MMC Security guards Laurie Semple of Church of God Road, Victoria; Sheldon Smart of 83 Plum Park, South Sophia; and Cedric Dummett of Republic Road, Victoria were gunned down at the Two Brothers gas station in Eccles. Cecil Duncan of 143 Da Silva Street, Kitty was the next to be fatally shot. He was stopped, robbed then shot. Lavern Garraway-Scott was in her Caesar Street, Agricola home when she was attacked. They shot her then set the house ablaze.
It has been just over four years since this unforgettable incident. Some of the suspected gang members have been killed in shootouts and others are still at large. Several relatives of the eight persons who were killed have relocated and are trying to move on with their lives. However, others have given up their hope for justice. Among them is Cameron-Bacchus.
After the incident, the woman recalled, police had told her that the gang “was to kill he [Rudder] long.
“I ain’t got no time with de police…they ain’t ‘kay nothing,” was Cameron-Bacchus’ response when asked about the last update she had received from police about the case.
The woman further said that there was talk that her mother and nephew had been involved in the kidnapping of a little girl. Cameron and her grandson Rudder, she stressed, were never involved in anything like that. It was all lies, Cameron-Bacchus insisted.
“My mother and stepfather were innocent… I don’t know if my nephew had a problem with them [the gang] but he was good boy… He ran the internet café and he did all he could for an honest living,” she said.
Cameron-Bacchus looks over her shoulder as she attends to her pot on the stove. She is silent for a few seconds, her expression fierce and then she says: “God, he always there. I know he would give me justice…looks how it rain that day when Fineman [Rondell Rawlins] and Skinny [Jermaine Charles] dead.”
Rondell ‘Fineman’ Rawlins and Jermaine ‘Skinny’ Charles were killed by a Joint Services team in August 2008. Police had said in 2006 that Rawlins led the 15-member gang responsible for the Eccles-Agricola killings and attempt to blow up the gas station.
Reports at the time had said that over a dozen gunmen under his command, reportedly dropped off in cars, blocked off a section of the road at Mc Doom and at Eccles and carried out a one-hour assault on residents of Agricola and Eccles. Some of the men walked to Two Brothers Gas station where they launched an attack aimed at burning it down. They then unleashed a volley of shots at the MMC security guards whose vehicle was having air put into its tyres at the time.
Following the execution of the guards, the gunmen walked into Agricola where they apprehended Cameron and Brummel in their homes. The elderly couple was shot several times and Brummel’s throat was sliced. They were then set alight on their bed. A similar assault was carried out at Caesar Street, Agricola where Assistant Town Clerk Lavern Scott-Garraway was shot and her body burnt. The gunmen went to the home and asked for her husband, David Scott, who wasn’t there at the time. They then demanded money, but before the woman reacted she was riddled with bullets and her house set on fire.
Stabroek News was told at that time that it was clear that the gunmen knew who their targets were. One resident had told this newspaper that persons had gone around the village a few days before warning villagers of the attack.
“People still talk about de attack,” Cameron-Bacchus said. “It is not something they can erase from their mind.”
The woman moves away from her stove and pulls a drape aside revealing the door to a bedroom. It was her mother’s bedroom, she explained, and then moved to the room next door where she was hiding when the gunmen invaded the house.
A small section at the side of the house which can be accessed from an inside door used to be Rudder’s internet café. Her nephew, Cameron-Bacchus explained, lived at Bagotstown but would go over everyday to operate his business.
The last time Cameron-Bacchus saw her mother alive was at the house’s front window. It was a few minutes before 10 pm and they were talking about the gunshots. It was later that the woman discovered the gunshots they heard were from the gas station attack.
Cameron-Bacchus said that night her mother and Brummel were in their room and Rudder and several patrons were in the internet café. From her hiding place under the bed, the woman recalled hearing several gunshots. Even today some of the holes left in the house’s inner walls still remain. Shortly after the gunshots started, they stopped for a few seconds and then she heard a voice shout: “Look de man run through de f*©£ing back door. Kill he! Kill he!”
There were several more gunshots. Cameron-Bacchus said it was later discovered that Rudder ran into the house from the internet café, locked the side door and then rushed through the back door. She believes that during her nephew’s mad dash he was shot, managed to jump the back fence and entered the school yard where he was later found dead.
A bullet hole still remains at a waist high concrete rail at the back stairway of Cameron-Bacchus’ house. Every time she looks at the bullet hole there, the horrific memories of that night rush through her mind.
“If my nephew didn’t run out that café and lock de door then all dem people in deh woulda been dead,” the woman said.
She also heard one of the attackers tell his colleague to let the “big people” out. Cameron-Bacchus said she thought that they had let her mother and stepfather go, not dreaming that they had been murdered as well.
There was also a brief time when Cameron-Bacchus thought she would have died too.
“They push the door to my room and after it dark they ain’t bother come in cause like they think no one was there,” she recalled. “I don’t know where they went after that.”
Garraway-Scott wasn’t so lucky. She was reportedly riddled with bullets then her body left in her Caesar Street home which was set afire by the gunmen. The woman’s daughter, six-year-old at the time, survived the attack. Reports had said the gunmen had told the child to run.
Stabroek News was unable to locate Garraway-Scott’s husband and could not ascertain whether he still resides in Agricola.
Cameron-Bacchus said she believes God is with her and she is facing her fears by staying in the house where her mother was murdered.
“Time has healed me somewhat, but the wounds are still here and they won’t ever get completely better,” she said.
Agricola, she said, was a wonderful place when she was growing up. She couldn’t say what happened to transform it into the notorious location that it is today. Cameron-Bacchus stressed that Agricola is a place like any other, with people who are Guyanese as well and the village is trying to regain its former peace.
“I feel safer when there is police presence in the village,” she disclosed, “and I really think they should build a police station behind the village.”
All the people who promote the stigma attached to Agricola, she stated, should understand that the village has produced great people. Her brother, Ronald Cameron is among those great Guyanese to have come from Agricola. Ronald, she said, was a broadcaster at the former Guyana Broadcasting Corporation but moved on the work in Antigua; Memphis, Tennessee and New York City in the US.
How did Agricola get lost? This, Cameron-Bacchus said, is a question many still struggle to answer. In the answer, she believes, is the solution to finding Agricola again.
Meanwhile, the pain which Bernadette Smartt feels seems to grow as time passes. Bernadette leaned against her front fence post, laughed at the sound of her son’s name and tears began to trickle down her cheeks.
Sheldon Smartt was her older son and he was the joy of her life. Bernadette still holds her job as a security guard and struggles to build her house. It was she, with the help of a friend, who had gotten her son the job at MMC.
“He felt that there was more to be gained from being a security guard as opposed to a police[man],” Bernadette recalled. “The April after he died would have made a year since he was working with MMC.”
As Bernadette spoke of Sheldon Smartt, tears continued to flow and increased with every sentence. After her son’s death MMC did the necessary but in the years after it is only her memories which keep him alive.
“My son died for nothing and there is no one to remember him,” she said.
Bernadette, like Cameron-Bacchus, doesn’t expect to ever get justice.
“I don’t believe that the police know anymore than I do exactly who killed my son. So how will they know who to arrest?” the woman stated.
Sheldon Smartt left a son, now five years old, behind. Bernadette said that the child’s mother is struggling like her to make a living.
“When my grandson needs something then his mother would tell me and if I can manage to give him it at the time then I do,” she said.
Life, the woman noted, must go on but even though time passes and people appear to be better they really aren’t. The memories, Bernadette said, remain inside where they still hurt you.
