The grue­some dis­cov­ery of two men, found dis­mem­bered in a stream in Cunu­pia on Mon­day, was yet more confir­ma­tion that Trinidad and To­ba­go is now be­ing stalked by a group of killers who are seem­ing­ly op­er­at­ing un­der the guise that they will nev­er pay for their crimes.

How else can one de­scribe the mind­set of the in­di­vid­ual/in­di­vid­u­als who would have car­ried out such an act? In­deed, the per­sons in­volved in this heinous crime not on­ly want­ed to kill their vic­tims but al­so seemed bent on do­ing so in the most ex­cru­ci­at­ing man­ner.

Most dis­con­cert­ing­ly as well, was the fact that had a cit­i­zen not stum­bled up­on the body of one of the vic­tims, it was quite pos­si­ble the men would not have been dis­cov­ered for quite some time or not at all, since the aqua life in the habi­tat had al­ready be­gun feed­ing on the re­mains.

Ei­ther way, to law-abid­ing cit­i­zens, it marked yet an­oth­er gris­ly turn in the trend of killings in this coun­try. This is be­cause this was the third time in un­der two months that such a crime had been com­mit­ted.

On Sep­tem­ber 22, po­lice dis­cov­ered a dis­mem­bered body burnt be­yond recog­ni­tion on an emp­ty lot at Bushe Street, Curepe. Days lat­er, on Oc­to­ber 2, Drag­on Boat en­thu­si­asts found an­oth­er dis­mem­bered body float­ing off Williams Bay in Ch­aguara­mas. Then came Mon­day’s find­ing, in which a man go­ing to look for flow­ers to per­form prayers found not one but two dis­mem­bered bod­ies.

The po­lice will now try to de­ter­mine what oc­curred in this mat­ter, but it is like­ly that they will have to de­pend on in­for­ma­tion from the pub­lic to do so. That, in to­day’s cli­mate of crime in T&T, is eas­i­er said than done.

In­deed, in the con­text of the con­tin­u­ing gang vi­o­lence in this coun­try, it is im­por­tant to note that the dis­mem­ber­ment of vic­tims is a trade­mark of Latin Amer­i­can gangs who use it to send a mes­sage to their ri­vals or the fam­i­lies of the vic­tims.

While this news­pa­per hopes it is not so, it is con­ceiv­able that cit­i­zens could now pos­si­bly be see­ing the spin­off of lo­cal gangs form­ing links with for­eign co­horts and car­ry­ing out their dead­ly codes of be­hav­iour on the T&T land­scape. Worse yet, it could al­so be clus­ters of for­eign gangs op­er­at­ing with­in our shores. The oth­er op­tion, of course, would be that there is a se­r­i­al killer at large but nei­ther of these sce­nar­ios give law-abid­ing cit­i­zens any com­fort at this point.

This sit­u­a­tion comes even as the coun­try was reel­ing from the killing of nine-year-old Jomol Mod­este at a play­ground in Ch­agua­nas over the week­end, in an­oth­er sce­nario in which crim­i­nals act­ed with no con­cern for in­no­cent by­standers as they sought to take out those they were hunt­ing.

Need­less to say, cit­i­zens have seen so much blood­let­ting this year across the coun­try that it is a fright­en­ing sce­nario. The TTPS con­tin­ues to at­tempt to con­vince so­ci­ety that they are do­ing all they can to de­ter crim­i­nals. How­ev­er, based on the events of the past 48 hours, we dare say no in­di­vid­ual can take the words of our law en­force­ment of­fi­cers at face val­ue, as T&T now seems in a very dark place where mur­ders are con­cerned.