Student Still Hospitalized after Shooting on Magazine Road: Family Pleas for Help
Kassman Gill
It has been eight days since fifteen-year-old Kassman Gill, a third-form student of Saint John’s College, was targeted as he walked on Magazine Road, just about five minutes away from his house. Another youth riding a bicycle shot Gill in the back of the neck. Surveillance footage captured the attacker riding past him moments before and then approaching him again, just a stone’s throw away from an unmanned police booth. Today, an angry father, Cecil Gill, lashed out at those circumstances and the plight his son finds himself in now, while the family struggles to come up with the funds to meet the mounting medical expenses. We spoke with him as he was leaving the K.H.M.H.
Cecil Gill, Father of Kassman Gill
“Right in front of Matron Roberts Health Centre there is a police outpost and it’s been sitting there for so long with not a police officer in it. If a police officer was there on that said day, my son would have been here with me. Because I’m sure that gunman would have think twice to even ride past that area because right at that junction my son met the gunman and he rode past him right in front of him and went around and came back around and meet him a little bit further up and that’s where he shot him. According to the doctors, he is still very, very critical. They managed to stabilize him with the medication – the blood pressure medication after his blood pressure dropped and he had a cardiac arrest over the weekend.”
Cecil Gill
Marion Ali
“Have they been able to remove the bullet?”
Cecil Gill
“No, no, no. No kinda surgery as yet; no kinda surgery as yet. We wanted to do an MRI and that’s not possible right now. We also want to try and see if maybe it could help that we could probably get him out of the country. That’s what I would like, you know, but financial – if we can do that, we’re hoping that we can get the help from whomever. I struggle to find a reason, you know, because my kid is such a good kid. You know, I’m not the parent who’s going to get up on national television and say that my kid is good when I know that he’s a demon. My kid is a wonderful human being. He nuh hurt nothing, nuh hurt nobody. Fi he pet da wa paraplegic cat that I wanted him to get rid of. He said, “No, dad, I’m going to keep him and take care of him.” That’s the kind of compassion, the kind of empathy that my boy carries.”
Marion Ali
“Is your son responding when you talk to him?”
Cecil Gill
“No. No response, but I talk. I talk and I play music and I sing for him. I don’t know if he’s hearing me, you know, because he’s sedated. But I do that. Sometimes I kinda get discouraged and then somebody would come along and just give me that strength, that encouragement to be hopeful again. Right now I feel hopeful after seeing him.”
Gill thanks everyone who continues to pray and assist them in this difficult time. If you would like to help with Kassman Gill’s medical expenses, his father’s phone number is 605-3186.
