On Thursday night, a man who was riding a bicycle pulled up behind the long barracks on Old Fabers Road. Five persons were standing outside talking, three young women and two men. The bicycle rider pulled out a handgun, pointed it in their direction and began squeezing the trigger. But nothing happened. The gun jammed. Quickly, the gunman got on his bicycle and rode off into the night. But it was a different story the following night, Friday, around 7:00 pm.
There was no warning this time, although it is not known whether the gunman and this assailant were the same person. And the closest that anyone got to being an eyewitness to this latest act of urban terror was a man who was inside his house taking a shower. The man, who spoke with Amandala on condition of anonymity, said: “I was taking a shower, when all of a sudden I heard like something was falling through the coconut trees in the lot behind my yard. The lot is separated by a zinc fence. There was a loud blast and a huge fireball.”
What he did not know was that someone had just hurled a deadly offensive hand grenade into the vacant lot immediately behind his house, and that the green vegetation acted like a shock absorber.
Meanwhile, outside on the street, a youth was seen running away from the scene. He was no more than fifteen, according to an eyewitness.
Clifton Neal, 26, was not at home when the blast shook his house and blew out one of the louvers in his window. But Neal was not far away. He told Amandala that he was at the house of one of his neighbors across the street when he saw a young man running very fast from the direction of the explosion.
“He had on a dark pair of pants and a white T-shirt. He ran and got into a car that was parked at the corner of Waight and Barnett Streets.
But in the commotion that followed the blast, Neal said that he was not paying too much attention to the youth who ran from the scene. Neither was he paying attention to the vehicle that the youth got into.
The grenade was thrown into an open lot that is known to some of the young men who hang out in there as the “Garden of Heathen,” so named because at least one person had been gunned down in there.
Fortunately this time, there was no one inside “The Garden.” Moreover, the person who threw the deadly missile would not have known this, because he would have had to come into view to discover that there was no one inside the garden. (Neal’s house stood in his way, so the grenade was hurled over the top of his house).
Within moments after the explosion, the area was buzzing with activity. Police descended on the area from all directions. Cops were on foot, on bicycles, in patrol vehicles, in uniform and in plain clothes.
Many of the houses reportedly shook from the impact of the blast, which was felt as far away as the Wilton Cumberbatch Football Field, itself about the length of a football field away. Nowhere was the blast more frightening than in the home of Hortense Crawford, 84, whose house is right next to “The Garden.” Crawford told us that: “Ah siddown right ya wid wa dolly ina mi hand. Ah tell mi granddaughter, gial mek a go in, go straighten di bed.”
All of a sudden, she told us, she heard “boom.!”
The light went off, she said, and the children hollered, “Gun, Mama, cover, cover.”
There were four small children and three older ones inside the house.
Another member of the household said, “This lee gial, Tessa, mi de inside di room di fix up her things, because she gwen paa one trip tomorrow. Kenya Well, 20, mi de ina di room wid e’ 8-month-old baby. When I yer di boom, di powa ah di thing mek I fling di pan, pan di bed. When I gone out de, out de mi smokey, smokey!”
Latanya Crawford, 13, attends Anglican Cathedral College and was doing her homework, when the blast shook her room, in the same house.
BDF Major, John Requeña, who is the BDF explosives expert, offered his opinion: “My estimation is that somebody was using it. It was not targeted at anyone. It affected three residents. First thing tomorrow morning we will come out and comb the area. We will find the pin and the fly-off lever and from that, we will know what type of grenade it was. There are at least fifteen or twenty countries who manufacture grenades. This is similar to the one I retrieved on September 6.” The Major spoke to the media around 11:00 Friday night.
But at a press briefing on Monday afternoon at the Racoon Street Police Station, not only had Requeña revised his theory about how the grenade came to be exploded in light of new evidence that was gathered Saturday morning, but the grenade has still not been classified. That is because the BDF and police were not able to retrieve the firing pin and pull-off lever that would have definitely confirmed the type and origin of the grenade.
Major Requeña, however, is of the strong conviction that it was an offensive grenade like the one that was discovered on September 6 during the Carnival Road March. But for now, at least, the police have no suspect in custody, and they have no leads in this latest act of urban terrorism.
“It was definitely a high explosive fragmentation device. From my experience, I can say that it was a grenade. Unless we find the fly-off lever, however, I cannot say exactly what kind of grenade it was. But I think it is an offensive grenade,” Major Requeña told the media this afternoon at the media briefing.