Lloyd Britton, the 20-year-old man who was shot by police on Saturday night on Mandela Avenue, is claiming that he and Elvis Fernandes were shot by the plain clothes policeman, who was Fernandes’ friend.
Britton, of Beterwer-wagting, East Coast Demerara, sustained a gunshot wound to his left side chest close to his heart and is now a patient of the High Dependency Unit (HDU) of the Georgetown Hospital where he is under police guard.
The bullet has not been removed from his chest.
Britton was said to be the shooter according to the police.
But Britton related a different version of how the incident occurred to this newspaper yesterday.
Speaking from his hospital bed, he said that earlier in the day he went to visit his mother, who lives at Shirley Field Ridley Square, and was heading back home in a Route 47 bus.
He said he was seated in the front passenger seat of the bus, which was filled with other persons, when a car stopped in the middle of the road at Mandela Avenue thereby blocking the bus’s path.
According to Britton, about six or seven men including the policeman in plain clothes, who was driving, exited the vehicle. One man had a gun and the other men were armed with cutlasses.
The men started to walk towards the bus, he said and he decided to exit the vehicle and run because he did not know what would happen next.
As he did so, he said, the policeman fired about three shots in his direction. Fernandes, he said, who was walking towards the bus with a cutlass, was fatally shot by the policeman.
As he kept running, Britton said, his left side began to feel stiff and that was when he realised he had been shot.
He then ran seeking help and the driver of a bus came to his assistance and took him to the station followed by the hospital.
The injured man also said that as the policeman began to fire shots, passengers in the bus started to jump through the windows in an attempt to escape.
Throughout the ordeal, Britton said, he was not armed. He also said he believed that the driver of the bus was the target of the attack.
The man also expressed concerned that he is currently shackled to his hospital bed and is under police guard “like I is some thief.”
