The Tribune

By RIEL MAJOR

Tribune Staff Reporter

rmajor@tribunemedia.net

THE mother of a teenager fatally shot while standing outside an Armbrister Street home Monday night is devastated by his murder.

According to police, shortly after 8pm on Monday several men were standing outside a home on Armbrister Street, Fox Hill, when a silver coloured vehicle pulled up. The occupants opened fired in their direction hitting three of them, before speeding away.

Police noted two men received non-life-threatening injuries and were taken to hospital, while a third person died at the scene. He has been identified as 19-year-old Aurelio Deal.

Deal’s mother wept loudly and was too distraught to speak when The Tribune visited her Fox Hill home yesterday. She hysterically screamed repeatedly, “Oh God help me, oh God help, I gone die.”

However, The Tribune spoke to another relative, who did not want to be named. She said Deal “wasn’t perfect, but had no issues with anyone on the streets.”

The relative also said: “He never kill anyone; he may (have) kept company with maybe the wrong people, but not because you keep company with the wrong people - I could keep company with someone who smokes but I don’t smoke.”

She said Deal’s family is not handling the tragic news well.

“My family is not doing good; they aren’t doing well because he was so young. (His mother) just, I don’t know how she will do it, but from last night she was the first one to run out after she heard the gunshots.”

She added: “When she saw him, she came back and she never went back out there after that. She’s still in denial waiting to see him come home. Right now, we aren’t dealing with this good. From 8pm she has been crying, she hasn’t sleep and she has high blood pressure.”

Deal’s relative said the family has to be strong for the victim’s mother, who is from Jamaica, and doesn’t “have much support.”

“We just have to cope and help the police to the best of our ability to deal with this situation so they could bring the person who did this to justice, but that’s beyond our control right now.”

She added: “We just have to leave it in God hands, who God keeps is well kept so there is nothing else we can do about it. He already gone, so sad to say, but I just trying my best for his twin brother because he doesn’t want to come back around here and this is his childhood home.”

There have been 12 recorded murders so far this month, more than double the total number of murders police recorded in September 2018, which was five.

The killings pushed the murder count to 75 for the year, according to this newspaper’s records, an increase of about nine percent compared to this same period last year. These figures have not been confirmed by police.

The Tribune’s records show that around this time last year, the country’s murder count stood at 69.

Anyone with information is asked to call police at 502-9991 or Crime Stoppers at 328-TIPS (8477).