Children at risk

Zwade Alleyne was hanging out with friends on May 10, at his home in Maloney Gardens, when a bullet ploughed through his brain.

On May 15, five days after being shot, he passed away at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex.

The 17-year-old was a promising footballer, studying for his exams and all his promise was cut short because someone fired a shot and didn't care where it went.

And just in the micro-nexus of East-resident schoolboy with football ambitions, he is not alone.

In April, Ezekiel Ramdialsingh, also 17 and a former Arima North teammate of Zwade, was murdered in La Horquetta. His killing was equally senseless. A gunman ran up on a group of friends liming at a shop in Phase Four and opened fire, killing him.

Jayden Moore, another young footballer, was murdered in September 2024 as he tried to drive away from an attempted carjacking on the Eastern Main Road in D'Abadie. The 19-year-old Premier League footballer died after midnight that Friday morning, slumped over the steering wheel of the crashed car, bleeding from five gunshot wounds. Sports will not save this country's children. Bullets will find them anywhere. There's a tendency to reflexive cynicism when relatives describe a murder victim as a "good boy," but what is society to do when those who are killed are not just trying to do better, but are doing so in environments that conspire to distract, entice, and ultimately destroy them? What are the professionals and concerned citizens who often volunteer their time to make a difference in hotspot areas in the lives of at-risk youth to make of these casual, pointless killings?

These young men are targets, collateral damage as these child "shottas" stumble with careless inhumanity through civil society, spitting bullets until they find themselves on the wrong end of a gun. In 2022, the Children's Authority warned of a rise in gun violence that either directly threatened or through adjacent murders, traumatised children.

The TTPS does not break out murder statistics by age group, but press reports suggest that dozens of uninvolved children are part of the annual homicide count.

A 2023 IMPACS study of small arms violence in the Caribbean found only incremental reductions in homicides per 100,000 citizens from 2016 to 2020, with Jamaica, TT, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines recording the highest gun murder rate.

The report also found gun culture to be a prevalent element across the region, with many interviewed inmates noting that they first had a gun before they were 14. Former education minister Nyan Gadsby-Dolly noted in 2024 that 54 per cent of all violent crime, including murder, was being committed by young men between the ages of 15 and 19. Those three young footballers were trying to do better. How do we reach children who just don't care?