AN­NA-LISA PAUL

Se­nior Re­porter

an­nal­isa.paul@guardian.co.tt

Al­though the one-year-old Venezue­lan boy who was struck by two stray bul­lets last Mon­day in El So­cor­ro re­mains hos­pi­talised in sta­ble con­di­tion, his trau­ma­tised fam­i­ly on Thurs­day begged for help to leave this coun­try.

Orig­i­nal­ly, the fa­ther of Jose Nunez En­rique vowed to stay in T&T de­spite the in­ci­dent, say­ing it was still much bet­ter than life in Venezuela.

But yes­ter­day, an­oth­er rel­a­tive, speak­ing on be­half of the fam­i­ly, said they now want to leave and mi­grate to the US, say­ing the lo­cal crime sit­u­a­tion had left them scared and un­cer­tain of their fu­ture.

The fe­male rel­a­tive of lit­tle Jose begged, “We are al­ready ex­pe­ri­enc­ing trau­ma from every­thing that hap­pened. We want to leave here.”

While they re­main stead­fast against re­turn­ing to Venezuela, she said, “We come for a bet­ter fu­ture for our chil­dren and then this hap­pened. I have four chil­dren and my sis­ter has three and the chil­dren are scared, they can’t even hear things, they start cry­ing and scream­ing.”

Jose had been play­ing with two oth­er chil­dren around 9.45 pm on Mon­day, in the walk­way of his fam­i­ly’s rent­ed apart­ment at Lootoo Street, El So­cor­ro, when he was shot af­ter a gun­man came run­ning from the di­rec­tion of the Mus­lim Ceme­tery, El So­cor­ro, fir­ing his weapon in­dis­crim­i­nate­ly.

The in­fant, who was shot once in each thigh, is ex­pect­ed to be re­leased from the Wendy Fitzwilliam Pae­di­atric Hos­pi­tal, Mt Hope, next week.

De­spite Jose’s im­pend­ing re­cov­ery from the gun at­tack, his rel­a­tive told Guardian Me­dia, “We are all un­em­ployed. We are go­ing through dif­fi­cult times. We don’t have mon­ey, it’s too dif­fi­cult. We want­ed to leave Trinidad and To­ba­go last year.”

She ap­pealed for help to move to an­oth­er coun­try.

“Trinidad and To­ba­go is a dan­ger and from what we see, there are no rights for any­one here. They are as if we do not mat­ter and we can­not con­tin­ue like this with so many chil­dren we have. There is no ben­e­fit or help. Every­thing is dan­ger.”