They lived by the gun, and they died by the gun

BELIZE CITY, Thurs. July 4, 2019– Janet Felix, the mother of Emory Felix, 33, and Maurice Felix, 34, was lying down in bed last night at her home on Sanker Street, watching the evening news, when one of her daughters went to her and told her, “Ma, you better get dressed, because dem boy dem get shot, and it noh sound like it’s alright.”

That’s how she got the news, Felix said in an interview this morning.

Shortly after she got that piece of information, Felix rushed to the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital, but her sons had not yet been taken there.

Felix then rushed to Baymen Avenue, and when she arrived there, she saw one of her sons, Emory, stretched out on the street. He was dead.

Felix said there was a crowd of people on the street, and the police and scenes of crime technicians were still processing the area. At first, they would not let her near the body, but eventually, they let her through.

Felix said that she removed the sheet which was covering his body and saw that his eyes were open, and so she “closed them; but they opened again.”

Felix, 68, asked about the whereabouts of her other son, Maurice, and was told that he was upstairs. She then navigated her way up a “very long step” and found her other son stretched out on the floor. He, too, was dead.

“I spoke to him and straightened his body and closed his eyes,” Felix said.

“All I wanted was for my sons to go back to church with me,’ Felix said, “but the boys from the Southside sent message that they will kill them anywhere they find them, even in the church. They said that they will come to this house and shoot them up right here. So they couldn’t stay here, because I couldn’t handle that, but anything that they needed, they would send to me for.”

At their press briefing this morning, police would only say that they are investigating the double murder, and that they did not have any suspect in custody.

When asked if there were any leads in the investigation, Assistant Superintendent Alejandro Cowo said that police were canvassing the area and are gathering intelligence.

Police said that last night, Wednesday, sometime around 6:30 p.m., two men entered Sky Deck Sports Bar and Grill, located on Baymen Avenue, and fired several shots at Maurice and Emory Felix, who were playing pool.

When the barrage of gunshots was fired, Maurice Felix managed to run outside into the street, where he was shot and fell dead.

Cowo was asked if they have been able to establish a motive for the killings.

Cowo said that the shooting might have been as a result of what the brothers were in prison for. Both brothers were charged with the murder of Mark Vernon and the attempted murder of Vernon’s mother, Pamela Cumberbatch, a shooting that occurred on the night of May 27, 2015.

Vernon was at his home, located on Caesar Ridge Road, when he was hit with a barrage of gunshots. Vernon, 27, was hospitalized, but died on June 8, 2015.

The charges against Emory and Maurice were upgraded to murder, and they were remanded on murder and attempted murder charges.

After spending almost four years on remand, they filed a bail application at the Supreme Court. Bail was initially denied, but in January, their attorney, Oscar Selgado, managed to convince the court to grant them bail, and they were granted bail on the condition that they report to the police station three times each week.

Due to threats made against them, they did not return to their mother’s Sanker Street home, but sought living accommodations elsewhere.
The murder of Mark Vernon was not the only murder rap that the Felix brothers have faced.

On April 10, 2006, Mitchum Heredia, 29, a mechanic and resident of T-Street in the Port Loyola area of Belize City, was shot and killed. Emory and Maurice Felix were charged with his murder, but after three separate trials in the Supreme Court, they were set free.

The first trial ended in an acquittal, which was appealed. A second trial ended in a hung jury, and after the third trial, the Crown had to set them free. They were released from prison in July 2014.

In 2007, the older Felix brother, Curlin “Cluck Cluck” Felix, died in a hail of machine gun fire on Central American Boulevard.

Their mother, Janet Felix, is of the view that that killing was in retaliation for the murder of someone named “Williams,” who was a brother of the present Commissioner of Police, Chester Williams.

Today, during an interview, Felix made several references to the murder of her oldest son and how several attempts were made to kill her two younger sons.

Felix said that her sons went into the streets due to constant police harassment. Felix recalled being invited to a meeting at the Raccoon Street Police Station, where she was told that her oldest son, Curlin, had killed a man named Williams.

“I decided to speak to a policeman, who told me that the man Williams was Chester’s brother,” Felix recalled.

Felix described her sons as “time bombs,” and said, “I would have preferred for them to stay in jail, because the case is a winning case. It is something that I was expecting.”