Mark Gardiner succumbs to gunshot wound
The murder of Mark Gardiner is the country’s sixty-seventh of the year, but as News Five’s Janelle Chanona reports, his death has triggered more questions than answers about national crime rates and their impact on the country’s resources.
Janelle Chanona, Reporting
At ten fifteen last night, doctors at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital recorded the death of twenty-six year old Mark Gardiner.
Gardiner was shot at close range in the back of the head on Thursday morning at the corner of East Canal and Water Lane in Belize City. The critically wounded man was rushed to the K.H.M.H. where he later underwent emergency surgery.
Dr. Khalid Ghazy, Director, Medical Services, K.H.M.H.
?The surgery was successful in the sense of the procedure to relieve the pressure on the brain but Mr. Gardiner?s condition after the surgery didn?t change. He was in critical condition and he passed away six hours after the surgery.?
Janelle Chanona
?Did he manage to say anything? Was he responsive at any time??
Dr. Khalid Ghazy
?Not at any time, from the time he came to the hospital, his condition was the same. There were no changes on his unconscious, when I described as critical, that means he was unconscious and his vital signs were not stable at all.?
Bob Gardiner, Victim?s Father
?Why? That?s question I want to ask them. Why??
As they prepare to bury their loved one, the Gardiner family petitioned eyewitnesses to the murder to report what they saw to the police.
Bob Gardiner
?They can come forward if they so cares to come, and well if they are not afraid that they are going to kill them. Because this looks like the go in Belize now. If you report something, the boys they try to get you. But I am not afraid of none of them.?
Janelle Chanona
?Would you hope Mr. Bob that this is the end of the violence??
Bob Gardiner
?Man, I hope that this is the end of the violence and there is nothing more that I can say because the boy is dead, and if he is dead now what will be fight about. If he was living, yes we can fight but if he is dead, what is there to fight about.?
But the Gardiner case has highlighted another troubling issue: the need for expanded trauma services at the K.H.M.H.
Dr. Khalid Ghazy
?Our resources are getting too thin with these things. We try our best with them.?
According to Director of Medical Services Dr. Khalid Ghazy, designed in 1995 the emergency room at the K.H.M.H. has outlived its effectiveness.
Dr. Khalid Ghazy
?If you go to the emergency room, you will see that it?s limited. And the amount of trauma that we are seeing, the amount of gunshots, chop wounds that we are seeing it?s all increasing. Our staff, actually we are staffed very well with the human resources and even our equipment, but the space that we are working with…?
That space currently includes two beds in the trauma centre and a third in a ?mini? facility. Over the past two months, the hospital?s administration has been in contact with architects from Mitchell and Moody to devise a way to use the open space adjacent to the ER.
Dr. Khalid Ghazy
?We are in a process of actually expanding our trauma room to ten extra beds at the emergency. Unfortunately just to adapt to the more trauma that we have, but it is for the benefit of the patient or the people that attending to Karl Heusner.?
The project is budgeted to cost one hundred thousand dollars in just building materials and tonight the hospital is hoping the public and private sector will be able to pool resources to finance the hefty price tag of the necessary medical equipment to turn the K.H.M.H. Emergency Room into a state of the art facility.
Reporting for News Five, I am Janelle Chanona.
According to the Gardiner family, Mark Gardiner will be buried next week, following a post mortem which is scheduled for Tuesday. Police tell News Five that this afternoon they detained Kareem Lopez to assist them in their investigation.
