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Monday, February 17, 2025

Once peaceful Bethel shaken by violent crime

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667 days ago
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The re­turn of the To­ba­go Jazz Ex­pe­ri­ence af­ter a three-year ab­sence has been over­shad­owed by a re­cent up­surge in vi­o­lent crime in the Bethel com­mu­ni­ty.

Once known as a safe and peace­ful com­mu­ni­ty, Bethel has been shak­en by vi­o­lent crime as the most re­cent of the three mur­ders record­ed in To­ba­go over the last two months oc­curred there.

Long-time res­i­dent Eu­ni­cie Pan­tin the cur­rent crime rate is some­thing she nev­er wit­nessed in her al­most sev­en decades of ex­is­tence.

“We re­al­ly don’t like that here, we nev­er used to have that and it is so up­set­ting, she said. “For the year how much gone al­ready? We not ac­cus­tomed to that.”

Pan­tin no longer feels safe and ad­mits that she is tak­ing ex­tra pre­cau­tions at her Rise­land Hill home.

“Hear­ing about the crime, all like me who used to be out­side on the road all hour of the night, I don’t go in the road at all at all again. Sev­en months now I haven’t gone on the road,” she said.

The crime sit­u­a­tion was even men­tioned dur­ing the first event of the To­ba­go Jazz Ex­pe­ri­ence, the Gospel Night on Thurs­day. In re­marks be­fore the start of the con­cert, Chief Sec­re­tary of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Far­ley Au­gus­tine said prayers are need­ed to deal with crime and oth­er so­ci­etal ills.

Pan­tin ad­mit­ted that the crime sit­u­a­tion has caused her faith to wa­ver.

“With all the things that go­ing on you think peo­ple not say­ing a lit­tle word, but you doesn’t know where they go­ing to do it and when they go­ing to do it. That is the prob­lem, you don’t know,” she said.

An­oth­er Bethel res­i­dent, Ter­rence David, 60, called for a top-down ap­proach to crime fight­ing.

“Poor peo­ple can­not make guns, poor peo­ple can­not buy guns and you have all the rich peo­ple bring­ing in the guns. So all the mea­sures tak­ing place per­tain­ing to crime is to fa­cil­i­tate the peo­ple at the top and that has to change,” he said.

To­ba­go’s homi­cide rate pales in com­par­i­son to Trinidad and David ex­pressed con­cern about the role of Trinida­di­ans in the cur­rent up­surge in vi­o­lence on the is­land,

“A To­bag­on­ian would not hurt you but when you have the twin­ning with the Trinida­di­an and the To­bag­on­ian the Trinida­di­an tends to have some kind of in­flu­ence over the To­bag­on­ian and they get in­to crime based on that,” he said.

Oth­er res­i­dents, who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, said busi­ness own­ers are reel­ing from vi­o­lence and crime across the is­land.

Shop own­er Cyn­thia Stephens said in­ter­ven­tion is es­sen­tial.

“When peo­ple hear about that and shoot­ings they would be scared be­cause no­body knows when they com­ing to do a shoot up. The au­thor­i­ties have to come around and vis­it the ar­eas and talk to the young peo­ple be­cause crime will hum­bug busi­ness and we don’t need that at this time,” she said.


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