A 19-year-old cashier was shot dead on Monday night as gunmen opened fire on two men killing her as she went to throw garbage outside her home in San Juan.
According to police, around 9 pm police were alerted to gunshots on Bagatelle Road, San Juan. When they arrived they found Karin Grant dead along with a man who remained unidentified up to late yesterday.
A third man was shot in the leg and is warded in a stable condition at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex.
Police believe one or both men were the gunmen’s target and suspect the shooting may be in retaliation to a shooting in Laventille Road last week.
Police said the unidentified dead man was sitting on a staircase peeling oranges when he was ambushed.
While the gunmen pounced on him, Grant was walking nearby and was shot. The second man escaped as the gunmen, with an automatic weapon, opened fire indiscriminately.
Speaking with the media yesterday at the Forensic Science Centre, St James, Grant’s older brother, Kimroy, said Grant’s mother, who is hospitalised for a heart condition, had to be sedated after hearing her daughter was killed.
“She used to like to be in all the activities... camping, hiking and those kind of things. She liked to do sports and thing. She was never in gang or anything.
“She was a person who was always home,” Kimroy said, adding his sister worked at as a cashier at a company in the Fernandes Compound, Laventille.
The dead woman studied to become a mason with the Multi-Sector Skills Training Programme.
Kimroy added his family had constantly asked their landlord to secure the property as the area was open, causing men of ill-repute to assemble there as it was a great vantage point.
He said: “The thing is we renting up there and the landlord has a no trespassing sign but we can't tell them that and they don't take that on. Them men have sure firepower.
“We talked to the landlord because people get rob, tenants get order to move out because a man put up security cameras and they shoot up the place.
“This girl was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Normally she would just come out on the step and talk to her friends and then go back inside.
“She's not no bad person,” Kimroy said, adding that his sister, the youngest of four children and only girl, was a “normal teenager” who just started to live her life.
“I only scrubbing blood whole day off the wall. Some of it not even her own. She used to take care of my six-year-old nephew and he keeps telling me last night that Karin dead.
“I don’t even know if he knows what that means. He used to be with her all the time, when she go and sleep, he does go to. She used to take care of him like a mother,” Kimroy said.
The carpenter added now his cries for safety measures to be put in place have fallen on deaf ears by the landlord and his sister being killed at her home, his only option now was to move out.
“Moving out is an option, knowing the area always hot. I working across the road from my home but this not making sense. No one want to live in the area or go in that room (where Karin slept),” he added.