Slain 16-y-o misses out on birthday baby

Sheka Robinson believes that a pang in her stomach while she was at work last Friday morning, followed by a teacup shattering, were omens of the fatal shooting of her 16-year-old son, Dave Tyrrell, in Denham Town, west Kingston.

His murder, around 9 a.m. on Drummond Street, may have sparked what some believe was a reprisal shooting on Saturday morning around 6:10 on Oxford Street in Hannah Town nearby, during which a 38-year-old Guardsman security guard was shot multiple times but survived the attack.

Determined that her son’s murder will not go in vain, Robinson believes that the usually jovial Dave was killed because he kept company with the wrong crowd.

“I said to my supervisor, ‘When your belly move, what is that?’ She said, ‘The blood of Jesus is against that talk.’

“When mi bredda-in-law call mi and seh dem kill him, I thought it was a joke,” she told The Gleaner, having recounted how the fallen cup broke into pieces “like when you crush up eggshell”.

Denham Town is one of Kingston’s grittiest neighbourhoods, known as much for its poverty as for teeming gangs that have for years made the community a bloody battleground. It was declared a zone of special operations in 2017, giving the security forces a firmer hand, but gun violence still lingers.

NO GANGSTER

Robinson, who has vowed to fast and pray for nine days in hope of her son’s killer meeting his demise, insisted that her boy was no gangster, claiming instead that he was a peacemaker and a “girls man”.

Pointing to his pregnant girlfriend, Robinson shared that the family was expecting a baby girl on May 11, Dave’s birthday.

A relative said that as Dave sat on the ledge of a gully outside the home chatting with a friend, a gunman appeared from Percy Street, pointing a firearm at the friend. Three attempts were made at squeezing the trigger, the family member said, but the firearm failed to discharge.

He then turned the gun on Dave, shooting him in the chest. The 16-year-old ran off and fell on his face a few metres from where he had been sitting.

“He was a nice and jovial youth. ... Dem couldn’t just shoot him and cripple him mek mi tek care a him fi di rest a him life?” his mother lamented.

... Him run fi him life go up di road and drop. When dem do turn him over, him a beg fi water, water. But dem time dem a death a bite him,” Robinson said.

Gunmen returned to their home Saturday morning, firing inside and forcing all occupants to get “flat”.

Meanwhile, the emotional mother of the security guard who was shot and injured in Hannah Town on Saturday in a supposed reprisal attack for Tyrrell’s murder wants justice for her only child, who she said works at the Port of Kingston and doesn’t “keep friend”. The guard went to retrieve his motor vehicle from a church close by when he was shot twice – in the face and the back.

“A mi one pickney and him a good pickney. Him not even talk,” the guard’s mom said. “ ... Coronavirus not even a take di gunman dem. A pure good people it a tek.”

Neither the guard nor his mother was identified because of security concerns.

jason.cross@gleanerjm.com