Minutes after gunmen in a vehicle discharged several rounds on D’Urban Street, causing the patrons of a nearby bar to panic, they were chased to the Cummings Lodge area where they exchanged gunfire with police.
Shortly after 10pm last night, a vehicle reportedly drove-by a bar located a short distance from the Bettencourt Diner on D’Urban Street, Georgetown and the occupants fired several shots in the general direction of the building.
When Godfrey Scipio realised that gunshots were discharged in his directions, reports said, the man panicked, fell, hit his head and was rushed to the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC). Scipio did not sustain a gunshot wound.
Scipio, a woman who was in the bar at the time said, was standing on the sidewalk just outside the hangout spot.
The woman said that she heard two to three gunshots but by the time she rushed outside everything was over. “I don’t really know is what happen but I know I hear the gunshots,” she told Stabroek News.
Meanwhile, some persons who were in the area at the time have suggested that the gunmen in the vehicle had made a failed attempt to rob someone who was in the area and as they were escaping they opened fire.
Approximately 15 minutes later, police exchanged gunfire with several men in a vehicle in the Cummings Lodge area. A man, who was in the vicinity, told Stabroek News that a police patrol had been chasing the vehicle when the occupants opened fire.
The police retaliated but the attackers managed to escape, the man said. “I just beat out de area,” he said. “I ain’t wait to hear nothing more.”
However, shortly after the shooting in Cummings Lodge the man said a friend called to inform him that police were patrolling the Sophia area as well and had picked up several men. The men were taken to the Turkeyen Police Station for questioning.
The brother of one of the men who was arrested, the man reported, told him that police were looking for men who opened fire on D’Urban Street and managed to escape to the Cummings Lodge area. “De man tell me that he brother been liming in Sophia and the police just pick he up…he seh that de police been chasing some man them that been shooting up on D’Urban Street,” the man said.
Apart from Scipio, who hit his head, no one else injured during the two incidents.
