TOP: Racquel Griffith

ABOVE: Saddique
Nicholas Fortune

Saddique Nicholas Fortune has been identified as the man found beheaded and shot to death in Sea Lots, Port-of-Spain, two Saturdays ago. Fortune,19, was identified by his mother, Racquel Griffith, at the Forensic Science Centre, where an autopsy was conducted on Friday. Fortune’s decapitated and battered corpse was found on Pioneer Drive. His head was discovered in a shallow grave near his body, which was at the side of the road. The killers reportedly played football with the victim’s severed head after the gruesome killing, which was reportedly recorded on a cellphone and was being circulated, the T&T Guardian was told.

Griffith said she strongly believes her son was involved in criminal activity, based on the brutal manner in which he was killed. “People don’t kill people like that...He had to be in something, since he was butchered to death. They killed him really bad,” she said. Fortune was shot, chopped, stabbed and his head severed and dumped in a hole dug by his assailants. The woman, who was able to contain her emotions, said Fortune never had any good ambition. She said he often kept the wrong company and his actions demonstrated he had been straying in the wrong direction. “I am not going to cover for him. He is my son, but I thought he would have been an obedient child.

He never listened to me and he did not have any goals. “It is sad to lose a child when you have one on the way,” the mother-to-be said as she gently touched her stomach. Griffith, who said she was a small song writer, promised to put a song Fortune wrote for her in a memorial for him one day. In an unusual move, she apologised to her son’s killers for whatever he did which angered them to the point that they slaughtered him. Griffith said she even promised to buy a piece of land and a motorcar for Fortune, but he showed no interest. Fortune, whose last address was Paramin Village in Maraval, was buried with full Muslim rites on Saturday.