Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Three men are dead and a fourth was wound­ed af­ter gun­men stormed a house in Matu­ra ear­ly on Sun­day morn­ing.

While po­lice are con­tin­u­ing en­quiries in­to the at­tack, rel­a­tives sus­pect it was a rob­bery, as the at­tack­ers were over­heard de­mand­ing cash and valu­ables be­fore mur­der­ing the trio.

Po­lice said cousins Mal­colm Richard­son, 21, An­dre Mel­oney, 20, and Sher­wyn Mac­Fall­en, 17, were asleep at their fam­i­ly’s Men­doza Street home at 1.10 am when gun­men en­tered the house through the back door.

The trio were awak­ened and gunned down de­spite plead­ing with their killers for mer­cy.

A 30-year-old man who was in the house at the time was al­so shot twice in his chest by the at­tack­ers who then ran away.

Matu­ra po­lice were called in and they took the wound­ed man to hos­pi­tal, where he was treat­ed for a col­lapsed lung. He re­mained ward­ed in sta­ble con­di­tion last night.

At the fam­i­ly’s home yes­ter­day, Whit­ney Sookdeo, the sis­ter of Richard­son and cousin of Mel­oney and Mac­Fall­en, said she was about to take a swim in the fam­i­ly’s pool at the front of the prop­er­ty when she heard two gun­shots but orig­i­nal­ly thought it came from the neigh­bour’s home.

On check­ing the se­cu­ri­ty cam­era feed in a par­lour at the front of the home, she saw two gun­men and im­me­di­ate­ly tried to es­cape.

“I hide be­hind some blocks, and I hear more gun­shots and my broth­er and them bawl­ing. I put a crate and jumped over fence ran on­to the road and straight to the po­lice sta­tion,” she said.

“I ran non-stop but then I reached the junc­tion and asked a guy on a bi­cy­cle, I told him I couldn’t make to get to the po­lice sta­tion. By the time I got back there the po­lice van was dri­ving in­to our street.”

Sookdeo said while she did not know her broth­er or cousins to be in­volved in any­thing il­le­gal, she was told by an­oth­er rel­a­tive the gun­men were heard de­mand­ing cash.

“When the killers came in my broth­er’s room, some­one said they were ask­ing him for the gold and the mon­ey. It seems to be a rob­bery.

“My broth­er (Mal­colm) told them, ‘Look d bag take what you want,’ and they still shoot him in his head.”

Sookdeo said the gun­men cut a hole through a wire fence to en­ter the prop­er­ty, not­ing that they walked through a neigh­bour’s yard to get there.

She added that dur­ing the at­tack, one of the rel­a­tives tried to es­cape the house by run­ning through the back­yard but ac­ci­den­tal­ly came face to face with the gun­men.

“When I looked at the footage, I saw him beg­ging them. When he jumped through the win­dow, he met them at the back. He tried to es­cape but in­stead ran in­to them.”

Re­flect­ing on the pan­ic she felt and how nar­row­ly she es­caped death, Sookdeo likened her ex­pe­ri­ence to what oc­curs in a movie, adding she did not feel like her­self even hours af­ter the mur­ders.

She al­so said the spate of vi­o­lence had left her shak­en and she no longer felt safe in the com­mu­ni­ty.

Sookdeo said Mac­Fall­en’s moth­er—her aunt—died some­time ago and she cared for the teen her­self. She said he re­cent­ly fin­ished his ed­u­ca­tion at the Matu­ra Sec­ondary School and had in­ten­tions of en­rolling in the Civil­ian Con­ser­va­tion Corps (CCC).

Mac­Fall­en, she said, walked with a limp due to a pelvic in­jury years ago.

One rel­a­tive who asked not to be named said the en­tire fam­i­ly was un­easy af­ter the at­tack, es­pe­cial­ly when un­fa­mil­iar ve­hi­cles drove past the house.

“It isn’t an easy thing, these guys were sleep­ing when this hap­pened. You aren’t even safe in your own house any­more and it throw the whole neigh­bour­hood off.”

Po­lice from the Homi­cide Bu­reau of In­ves­ti­ga­tions Re­gion II are con­tin­u­ing en­quiries.

The mur­der of the cousins was the lat­est flare-up of vi­o­lence in the East­ern Di­vi­sion, over the past 72 hours.

On Fri­day night, two women and a man were shot and wound­ed near a par­lour on Robin­son Lane, Damarie Hill, San­gre Grande.

Hours lat­er, 36-year-old Do­minic Cal­len­der, alias ‘Sask­ie’, was shot and killed out­side his Sap­phire Dri­ve, KP Lands, Va­len­cia home.

On Thurs­day night, a man was shot while dri­ving his sil­ver Nis­san Ti­i­da through a forest­ed part of Rio Claro.

Po­lice sus­pect the spate of vi­o­lence may be linked to a shoot­ing at­tack on a man con­sid­ered to be an un­der­world fig­ure in the East­ern Di­vi­sion last week.