Shooting victim says gunman was not her boyfriend

Earlier this week we reported on a shooting incident in Belize City that sent a teenage girl to the emergency room. Reports on Tuesday were that the shooting was the result of a domestic dispute, but as I found out from the victim this morning, there may be more to the story than meets the eye.

Sixteen year old Keiva Leslie was shot in her abdomen on Monday night by a young man whom police classified as her boyfriend. Speaking from her hospital bed though, Leslie denies the police reports, saying the shooting was no accident. According to Leslie, she and Kenrick Nuñez never had an intimate relationship, but that the families were close and that she often babysits Nuñez’s younger siblings.

Keiva Leslie, Shooting Victim

“Well his mother is a lady that work hard and his mother had ask my mother to let me stay at his house and help him with the small children and thing. So I gone, but like the way I rest with them, like family right, but I don’t know if he took the way I was acting as personal, like to be boyfriend or girlfriend thing, then I tell him no.”

But instead of walking away, Leslie says Nuñez was persistent on a relationship beyond friendship.

Keiva Leslie

“That if he can’t have me, then nobody can’t have me. But then I just took that as a joke, nothing serious.”

But the situation quickly turned serious this week when Nuñez confronted Leslie in her home on Mahogany Street Extension late on Monday night.

Keiva Leslie

“So he pulled out the gun and he set it at the bottom of my foot and he tell me, he will shoot me in my foot so I can stay home and stop walk about, cause any time he comes home, I am not home. But I did not take that serious. Then he pulled the trigger and the gun snap, so I wasn’t worrying, cause then I think the gun did not have any bullet. Then he move the gun from my foot and put it to my heart and said, “Oh how here, better?” Then he pulled it and it snap again. Then he get the magazine, knock it in and do something. Then he put his hand around at my side, and push in the gun and then shot me and I dropped. But my mother was around the curve by my house and I holler for my mother and she run come and I hug my mother and she took me to my aunt’s house and they took me to the hospital.”

Leslie says that in the commotion that followed the shooting, and efforts to get her to the hospital, no one noticed when Nuñez slipped into the same car that took her to the K.H.M.H.

Keiva Leslie

“Because everybody were frustrated and shock, yes or so. We never know that how, cause they put me to the back of the car to lie down. We never know that he get in the car, the back there, right. We never know that he was in the car, till we reach the hospital. So the understanding I get is that he was using that as an excuse that he did not mean to shoot me.

But then it could never be mistake when he know that the gun had in a bullet. I no know! He knew it had in and he will do that and then he will talk that he did not mean to do it? Most naturally he mean to do it, cause he put it at three different spots.”

According to Leslie, doctors at K.H.M.H. have advised her that the bullet is lodged in a delicate spot in her abdomen and should not be removed.

Sixteen year old Kenrick Nuñez has been charged with attempted murder, use of deadly means of harm and dangerous harm. He is on remand to the Hattieville Prison.