Family hounded to death

FATHER AND son, uncle and aunt, brother and sister – an entire family tree is, year after year, person after person, being erased.

The details involving the murders of coconut vendor Vikey Joseph and his son, Anthony, on April 22 in Cunupia are harrowing.

Only the latest episode in a long campaign of terror, they reflect more than just a return to a pre-state of emergency paradigm.

The plight of this clan is a blood-curdling sign of the depraved depths of criminal intent in this country and the concomitant failings of not only the justice system but also several organs of the state.

There is a lot of unresolved mystery in this case. But time itself gives a sick and sadistic meaning to that mystery.

Seven years ago, in January 2018, Sarah Joseph was gunned down. Five years later, her brother, Dillon, also a coconut vendor, was shot dead at his stall. The Joseph family home was reportedly burned down in 2023; another was sprayed with bullets just this month on April 4.

The young son killed on April 22 with his 43-year-old father in an early-morning ambush as they set out to work had been targeted and wounded in December. St Augustine, Cunupia, the open road – wherever the family has turned they have been, as if trapped in a Greek tragedy, cursed.

Emerging from all this is the fact that if a family is hounded – and the more members of the Joseph clan die, the less likely it is that these incidents are unrelated – there is very little that can be done.

There is no special asylum provided by the state, no financial grant, no safe-house. Even if such measures existed, the country is so small they might be ineffective, given the will of nefarious minds.

At the start of April, murders had already crossed 100. In the period 2018-2014, April killings totalled an average of 42. As of April 22, there were at least 121 murders, suggesting the country is, at the rate seen this month, on course for a tally just below the monthly average, though there was an SoE up to midnight on April 13.

But the Joseph family case is extreme enough to stand outside of month-to-month, year-to-year figures. It resonates more with other cases that seem inter-generational and intra-geographical.

For instance, the situation brings to mind the plight of fleeing residents of Trainline Village, St Augustine, over the years, a situation that forced on-the-ground police intervention by figures such as ACP Wayne Mystar. Such intervention is needed now on a national level. For, these victims are not bit players in a play. They are flesh and blood and this is the real world.