Husband and wife shot inside their Gungulung Area home

Four persons were injured in a space of twenty-four hours in Belize City. A couple was shot before midnight as they watched television at home. Hours earlier in the same neighborhood, another person fell victim to gunfire as he rode his bicycle on Marigold Lane. News Five’s Isani Cayetano reports.

Isani Cayetano, Reporting

The bloodstained furniture inside the home of Mark Cherington are the tell-tale evidence of an armed assault on the residence sometime after ten o’clock last night.  The attack has landed the thirty-seven year old tour guide and his common-law wife Jenene Parham inside the recovery ward at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital.  Cherington, who lives near the bank of the Belize River in the Gungulung area of St. Martin’s, was watching television along with Parham and their three kids when they came under heavy gunfire by a group of men who accessed the premises by boat.  His neighbor, who wished to appear off camera, recounts the harrowing ordeal.

Voice of: Resident

“I was asleep about around 10:30 or 11:00 when I heard a first loud shot, you know, and right away when I heard that it sound like a gunshot and then when I heard that, following behind that was a vast amount of just bullets like just spreading, something like a machine, something like a machine gun or something like that, you know.  I grab my kids them and, you know, I tell my kids them ‘yer what dis da gunshot, everybody get to the floor, lay down and then during that when I hear all of them firing and thing sudden everything get quiet.”

Prior to indiscriminately spraying Cherington’s home with a massive shower of bullets the men, who posed as police officers, told him that they were in search of Darren Banks.  Banks, however, is currently remanded at the Hattieville Prison.  Believing they were genuinely law enforcement officers Cherington opened his front door and that’s when the shooting began.  The neighbor continues his recollection of the incident.

Voice of: Resident

“Then I hear wah lee screaming and crying inside ah di house so I, you know, come out and I holla fi anybody een deh and thing and then I hyah wah lee gial di holla say help mi daddy cause mi daddy get shot, you know.  So I went ova to the premises and see how I coulda mi assist di people dem.  It wasn’t a pretty sight mein, to be honest.  It wasn’t something [pleasant to look at] really and for the amount of fire power and thing that I heard from experience, you know, [it’s] something, it’s hard to explain.  It’s hard to tell you exactly da what because da fus time [I see] something like that and yo could see the fire weh di come from that gun itself, you know, fi di amount weh ih di spit and di power ah di machine.”

Whatever it was the assault rifle used on the elevated wooden structure thoroughly perforated its zinc roofing as well as a number of household appliances within its perimeter.

Voice of: Resident

“When I get een deh da like blood all ova di place, blood pan di [ground].  The young lady done get shot and ih gentleman done get shot to.  I had to mi assist, you know.  Then the next thing is to police tek long fu reach da di areas.  When dehn do get ya da long afta everything done happen already fi do assist and when dehn get ya dehn still cyant assist. We had a friend that lives a couple houses away from us and he came over to ask if we need assistance whiching he had a boat so that came in at a properly, properly good time because then to transport them on foot from here to the road mouth was a little bit tight and through all that swamp and thing so he said the easiest way was to just use his vessel and he had a vessel and then transported them to the gas station here on the Northern Highway yes and then they called for the ambulance to meet them over there.”

Cherington was hit once in the left lower back while Parham was shot in the left elbow and right hand.  That incident succeeded another shooting which occurred in the St. Martin’s area a few hours earlier in which Lloyd Elijio was shot while riding his bicycle along Marigold Lane.  Viewers would recall that it is the same street on which twenty-thre year old Troy Bowen was shot on Wednesday morning.  While the spate of shootings in the neighborhood has injured a total of four residents it is unclear whether they are related. Reporting for News Five, I am Isani Cayetano.

In the other shooting on Wednesday, Troy Bowen was shot by two gunmen as he walked on Marigold Lane around eight in the morning. Bowen had also been shot three weeks earlier.  In the three shootings, no arrests have been but police are looking for Akeem Flowers in respect of the Elijio’s shooting as well as for Gilbert Craig and Theodore Andrews in the case of Bowen’s shooting.