(Jamaica Gleaner) Residents of the community of Maroon Town in south St James were yesterday cowering in fear following a string of violent incidents that escalated on Wednesday night and left a young couple gunned down at their business place in the area.
They are 36-year-old electrician Easton ‘Bryan’ Chambers and his pregnant 19-year-old common-law wife, Shantel Davis, who was due to give birth to his child later this month.
“Me frustrated because I grow him from six and know him never commit any wrong and always looking ways to move forward, always have a business mind,” said Easton’s uncle, Michael Chambers.
“How this country must run without creative people? The gunshot that she get cause the baby to protrude from her stomach when they moving her. Oh God, man!”
The callous nature of the act, which occurred about 9:30 p.m. in the area of the community known as Dundee, was reportedly carried out by two armed men.
Chambers and Davis were two of four people shot dead by gunmen on Wednesday night.
killed playing bingo
Seventy-one-year-old retired carpenter Alvin Reid and Ashmara Plummer, 37, who family members say was two months pregnant, were killed as they played a game of bingo with friends at a shop on Gunn’s Drive in their home community of Granville, St James.
Reports are that about 7:30 p.m., two men walked up to the shop, pulled firearms and opened fire. Reid and Plummer received wounds to the upper part of their bodies and died on the spot.
During a visit to Maroon Town, blood splatters, food strewn on the ground and discarded dominoes on the roadway were telltale signs of the horror that was unleashed at Chambers and Davis’ business place.
“I feel like fish out of water. When me hear I pass me faeces same time; me get nervous,” said Shantel’s 82-year-old maternal grandmother, Miriam James. “She never speak much. You can barely hear what she say when she talking to you.”
James recalled that she heard the explosions as she lay in bed and shortly after her daughter, Shernett Campbell, got the disturbing news that the fourth of her six children was dead.
“I heard her phone ring and then she cry out say, ‘Dem kill Shantel’,” James said. “I never worry go up there because it rained yesterday and me heart a give trouble and me have high blood pressure.”
The grandmother also told The Gleaner that Campbell had been taken to the hospital as her emotional state was weakening.