Good­wood Park, West­moor­ings' typ­i­cal­ly serene at­mos­phere be­came pan­icked and tense yes­ter­day af­ter­noon, af­ter po­lice shot and killed a ban­dit and ar­rest­ed two oth­ers as they re­spond­ed to a home in­va­sion at the fam­i­ly res­i­dence of busi­ness­man Lind­say Gillette.

Ac­cord­ing to po­lice re­ports, at around 1 pm, three armed men broke in­to the home along As­cot Road and held the oc­cu­pants, four women, hostage. Three of the women are Gillette’s rel­a­tives while the fourth was the fam­i­ly’s house­keep­er.

Dur­ing the or­deal, how­ev­er, one of the women man­aged to mes­sage rel­a­tives via What­sapp and they con­tact­ed po­lice. A con­tin­gent of of­fi­cers ar­rived at the scene short­ly af­ter.

Ac­cord­ing to po­lice, they sur­round­ed the premis­es and called on one of the men, who was armed, to drop his weapon. How­ev­er, po­lice said he re­fused and in­stead point­ed the gun to­wards them.

Of­fi­cers opened fire, shoot­ing him. The ban­dit was sub­se­quent­ly tak­en to the St James Med­ical Fa­cil­i­ty and trans­ferred to the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal but lat­er died. He was yet to be iden­ti­fied up to last night. His co­horts were ar­rest­ed and re­main in po­lice cus­tody.

A Glock pis­tol and a quan­ti­ty of am­mu­ni­tion were re­cov­ered at the scene.

A vis­i­bly-shak­en Gillette ar­rived at the scene mo­ments af­ter the in­ci­dent to com­fort his rel­a­tives and lat­er con­firmed to Guardian Me­dia that all of them were safe. How­ev­er, he re­fused to com­ment any fur­ther on the in­ci­dent.

Life-long Good­wood Park res­i­dent, Tonya St Cyr said she was shak­en up by the in­ci­dent, adding oth­er res­i­dents were al­so left trau­ma­tised. She said she nev­er could have imag­ined such an in­ci­dent would take place in her com­mu­ni­ty.

The en­trance to Good­wood Park is typ­i­cal­ly se­cured by pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty.

“I was about to look for my par­ents when I heard sirens...this has us very scared and shak­ing,” said St Cyr, who said she was born and grew up in the res­i­den­tial com­mu­ni­ty and had al­so nev­er ex­pe­ri­enced any­thing like that be­fore.

St Cyr al­so ques­tioned why peo­ple would break in peo­ple’s homes dur­ing the COVID-19 “quar­an­tine time.”