(Trinidad Express) A single stray bullet ended the life of mother-of-two Sherida Ali as she stood in the kitchen of her best friend’s Beetham Gardens home.
Whether law enforcement or bandits fired the fatal shot is already the subject of an investigation.
Around 6 p.m. on Saturday police were responding to the theft of a silver Nissan Note car in Arouca and had chased the car which was heading west on the shoulder of the eastbound lane of the Beetham Highway.
They said the car came to a stop near a berm at 19th Street.
Two men got out of the car and fired several shots at the police. Officers said they fired back and, sometime during the crossfire, Ali—who was liming in the kitchen of her friend’s house—was struck in the head by a bullet which went through a glass window.
The suspects escaped.
Police took Ali to the Port of Spain General Hospital where she was pronounced dead at 6.15 p.m.
Her sister, Ayesha Ali, spoke to the Express from her home in Bangladesh, St Joseph, yesterday afternoon.
“I was there with my sister. It had a car that stopped on the highway and some fellas run out and the police stopped behind them and just start to shoot. (Sherida) got shot in her head and the police just picked her up and dashed her into a van,” she said.
She said she was nearby when her sister got shot and was the first to attend to her.
“My sister’s blood still on me,” she said.
Ali was standing in the kitchen of her best friend Lisa Welch’s house when she was shot.
Welch said she felt a sense of guilt that her friend was killed while visiting her home.
“We were in the kitchen and (Sherida) had just spoken to her daughter and her husband on the phone. She hung up the phone and walked in the kitchen where I was standing up. She was in front of me and I was behind her and same time we hear one setta loud explosions and I just felt the splinters hit me here and I run back because my daughter was in the drawing room…” she explained.
She said, at first, she did not realise Ali had been shot.
“I saw a soldier come running (firing shots) like he going mad. Is when my husband tell me, ‘yuh girlfriend get shoot on the ground there’ and I was like…I cannot explain it,” she said.
She said a neighbour told the police outside that someone was shot in a house.
“The officer walk inside, watch she on the ground, come back outside and start to cuss and get on with the rest of police that was outside here,” Welch said.
He then came back and asked for assistance to pick her up.
“But she was already dead cause I check she pulse and I tried to feel any pulse and she didn’t have no pulse. They still picked her up, four of the officers, hand by hand, foot by foot and they put she in the van and they gone with she,” said Welch.
“This cannot go under the carpet, boy, because that’s my friend from young growing up. We worked together in the same place and that girl come to collect some money from by me from on work and she just decide to sit down and take a lil drink,” she said. “People cannot do that in their own house. I just want for my friend and she husband and she two children to get justice,” she said.
Welch said the occupants of the house and children in the area were traumatised by the incident.
“This is not no weed house here. No drug house. It is working people in here. I work, my sister works and the children going to school so it have no kind of illegal activities going on here but right now I not even feeling comfortable living here,” she said. “I never see nobody run in here but even if it was so and fellas running, why it is allyuh have to shoot…allyuh just shooting down wild and it had children all in the road. This is madness.”
Welch again appealed for justice for Ali.
“She was my best friend. We worked together, we go out and lime together and last week Friday we had a birthday party and now to come this next week to lose my friend inside this house?” she said.
“She has two daughters ages seven and 15 and they know that their mother come down on the Beetham and get killed so people wouldn’t want to come to the Beetham ever again,” she added.
She said she has invited friends to visit her in Beetham Gardens, but only Ali and her husband would show up.
Director of the Police Complaints Authority (PCA) David West confirmed yesterday that an investigation into Ali’s death had started.
“First of all, let me offer my condolences to the family of Ms Sherida Ali who was unfortunately killed during an exchange of gunfire between suspects and the police.
“We are aware of the police-involved shooting which took on the Beetham Highway, Port of Spain, on Saturday, January 18, 2025,” West stated in response to Express enquiries.
“The PCA has begun its investigation into the incident in which a civilian, Ms Sherida Ali, was killed during an exchange of gunfire between suspects and the police,” he said. “We cannot say at this stage whose bullet killed Ms Ali as we await the results of the post-mortem. We are hoping that the police officers involved were wearing their body-worn cameras so the PCA would be able to acquire video footage of the incident. The PCA would ask any witnesses to this incident to please come forward and assist in this investigation.”
He advised that anyone with information could e-mail the PCA at info@pca.org.tt or go to our website at www.pca.org.tt.
