Just before 9 a.m. on Saturday, Marlon “Figit Bird” Jones, 24, was gunned down and left for dead at his residence on Louise Bevans Street.
Police say that they found him lying face down on the verandah of his home, a wooden building, with a gunshot wound in the right side of his back. He was transported to the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital by the Belize Emergency Response Team, but he died while undergoing treatment.
Police also say that their investigations led them to believe that Jones, with whom they are familiar because they’ve had to deal with him in the past, was at his residence socializing with three other men. No description of the assailant(s) was given, but police did say that the men reportedly heard a gunshot, after which someone screamed (the police did not say who this person was, or where the scream came from).
When the commotion settled, Jones was discovered to have been hit. Police did not say what happened to the men who reportedly were with Jones at his house.
Amandala was unable to speak to anyone who witnessed the incident, but was able to interview his mother in Georgeville, Cayo, where he was raised. She told us that she had come to Belize City to see him after her trip out of the country, but didn’t have a chance to spend time with him.
She said that she received a call that he had been shot, but was told that he had not yet died. About half an hour later, she said, she received a call which confirmed that he had died. She said that it was very difficult news for her to receive, that her son had died.
According to Jones’ mother, he relocated from Cayo to Belize City sometime between 2006 and 2007. But he had several run-ins with the law, she said, and she often had to employ “tough love” with him whenever he ended up in jail.
She said that she often told him, whenever he was in jail, that she would try to provide whatever he needed, but that she would not go to prison to visit him. The last few occasions on which she saw him were in December of last year, when he spent a month in Georgeville, she said. He brought home a woman whom he claimed he was living with, and then he had returned to Belize City, said the grieving mother.
She said that he had spent a few months in San Ignacio, and during this time she had left the country. She would never see her son alive again. When she came back in early March, 2011, she was informed that he had returned to Belize City.
Jones had been charged in connection with a number of crimes, including several shootings in the city. He had at one point been charged with attempted murder, use of deadly means of harm and grievous harm committed against Deepak Gidwani, a Belize City businessman.
There are no records to indicate that he was convicted of any of the charges.