(Trinidad Guardian) With Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley and Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar set to meet on the rising crime scourge T&T is facing, some 308 people had been murdered as of yesterday, according to figures from the Homicide Bureau of Investigations. Of this number, up to June, 17.3 per cent of the cases had been solved.
The number of murders suggests that at least one person has been killed each day and if the current trend continues unabated, there could be a projected 460 killings by the end of the year.
For the first six months of this year, 228 people were murdered. Since then, in two months (July-August), 80 people were killed, an average murder of 30 to 35 killings a month.
To date, 29 of the 308 murder victims have been women.
Some of the more notable murders where the women were victims featured extreme violence.
On April 15, Felicia Persad, 29, was found in a leather bag which had been dumped in the Mitan River, Manzanilla. The bag was tied to the root of a mangrove tree and weighted down with piece of a decorative concrete pillar.
Almost one month prior to Persad’s discovery, the headless body of Eden Teesdale, 26, a janitor at the Mt Hope Women’s Hospital, was also found in the same river. Her body was found in a barrel which was floating down the river.
The torso had been stuffed inside the barrel with her legs protruding from the top. Teesdale, of Embacadere, San Fernando, was later identified through the fingerprint records.
According to Homicide officials, Persad’s murder was labelled as domestic violence and she was murder victim 139. Like Persad, Teesdale was labelled as a case of domestic violence. Her murder was recorded at 101. To date, no one has been held accountable for the deaths of these women.
Children were not spared either, as the first murder recorded for the year was Jodell Roberts, 6, who was gunned down on New Year’s Day. Police reported that a gunman opened fire on a group of Beetham residents ringing in the New Year, hitting the child in the back. This murder also remains unsolved.
Young Roberts was not the youngest victim, however, as 17-month-old Nyla Sanchez was bludgeoned to death on April 20 at her home at Marcano Terrace, Laventille. Seven days later, her father, Brandon Job, appeared before a magistrate charged with killing his child. Sanchez’s killing made up the three per cent of deaths caused by blunt force trauma.
According to figures provided by the T&T Police Service, a whopping 74 per cent of all murders were committed by guns, a fact that all senior police and divisional commanders agree on.
Black males between the ages of 26 to 35 are the majority of victims. The killers prefer to strike between 10 pm to 2 am, as just over 25 per cent of the recorded murders took place during this time.
Some 22 per cent of the victims have been killed from 6 pm to 10 pm, while police are unsure of the time period when at least 20 per cent of the murders took place.
Of the 308 murders, 141 are gang and drug-related; 32 as a result of robberies and 14 through domestic violence. Some 46 murders have also been labelled as revenge killings and 75 were either unknown causes or an altercation.
