Shooting leaves victim fighting for life
It was a big weekend for Belize’s emergency rooms as a number of shootings and stabbings kept doctors and nurses working late into the night. In the most serious incident one Belize City victim is clinging to life with a bullet still stuck inside his skull. Earlier I visited his family at the KHMH.
Sixteen-year old Roque Martinez is fighting to stay alive after he was shot in the face after one early Sunday morning. The bullet entered Martinez’s left eye and is presently lodged to the back of the young man’s head. Today the family remains hopeful that their son will make it.
Marielou Usher, Mother
“Well, the doctors give us pretty poor hopes, but I still have faith you know. I am holding onto faith that my son will be all right. When you call his name he answers you by saying aha, if you ask him, like when I tell him, I am your mother, squeeze my hand, he would squeeze my hand so I feel very good, but doctor still has him as critical but I have hope and faith so I am holding onto that.”
Martinez was out with his brother Hilberto and a group of friends in the Newtown Barracks area when they decided to go and buy hotdogs at a nearby park.
Jacqueline Woods
“The boys had just entered the BTL park when an argument started between one of them and a young man who had just to come to the park with another group of young men. Shortly after gun shots rang out.”
Hilberto Martinez said there were four of them inside the park when three boys approached them. Martinez said he does not know what the argument was about, but that his brother was mistakenly shot.
Hilberto Martinez, Brother
“Two boys were having an argument and the next boy punched one of them in the face and I see when the boy just backed up and haul out a thing out of his pants front and shoot after the boy that punched him. Then the boy he slipped the bullet and then it touched my brother.”
Martinez said he had just given his brother a hotdog when the man started firing.
Hilberto Martinez
“When I get my hotdog, I gave my brother one and I walked ahead to eat mine and then I heard the shots and I ran and when I watched back, I saw my brother and I ran back and picked him up and me and a next boy put him in the back of a taxi and rushed him to the hospital.”
Martinez remains in a critical condition at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital. Meanwhile as the police continue their investigation, they say at this time they have neither a motive nor suspect in the shooting.
