(Trinidad Guardian) An ongoing family dispute over a 16-acre parcel of land at O’Connor Street, Blanchisseuse, is being blamed for the killing of Carver Evangelist yesterday.
However, relatives believe his death could have been avoided if the T&T Police Service (TTPS) had acted on the more than 50 reports of death threats that he had lodged at the Blanchisseuse Police Station over the past two years.
Evangelist, 50, was shot in the back of the head by a gunman around 7.10 am on April 22, as he sat under a sapodilla tree higher up his street.
One relative cried yesterday, “I called the police and it took them 25 minutes to reach. If I was driving, I would have reached the station in two minutes, and running, in five. But it take them 25 minutes to come. If he had any chance of surviving, they make sure he dead.”
The land dispute has already claimed the lives of two of Carver’s sons in separate incidents in January and February 2021 respectively.
One man said, “We don’t have no guns and we don’t want to arm ourselves as we done get warning that the police will come for us, but they forcing us to do it now to stay alive.”
An elderly woman who declined to give her name said, “We are like sitting ducks just waiting to be killed.”
Numb and still reeling in shock over Evangelist’s death, a male relative expressed regret as he said, “I saw him sitting out by the road early and I felt like I should have tell him to go inside because he know they looking to kill him, but I didn’t.”
Asked if he felt he had failed to save Evangelist, the man admitted, “I feel like I failed him.”
Asked if the family was looking to leave the area as they were not safe and continued to be targeted, another man said, “I want them to move out of the country because there is nowhere in this country that is safe that they can’t get to you.”
Evangelist’s son Sherwin Maharaj, 31, was killed on February 17, 2021, as he took a soft drink to a relative near his house.
The former lifeguard was ambushed in the same manner as his father and shot in the back of the head near an abandoned house on the street.
Maharaj’s brother Mitchell Evangelist, 31, was killed along with Nigel Dedier, 51, on January 26 as they worked on a construction site along the Blanchisseuse Main Road.