Shooting victim Wallace Donald Matura dies

Wallace Donald Matura

Belize City police are tonight resuming their investigation into the shooting death of forty-eight year old Wallace Donald Matura, who was the target of a pair of armed assailants on February eighteenth.  Sometime after nine o’clock that night, while Matura stood in front of VIP Wireless on Orange Street, he was shot multiple times and left for dead by his attackers, as well as the officers who subsequently responded to the scene of the crime.  Also injured during the hail of gunfire were two bystanders.  While Matura miraculously survived the ordeal and was on the way to a promising recovery, the unfortunate news tonight is that he succumbed to his injuries at noon today.  Matura, according to his relatives, began experiencing difficulty breathing over the weekend; however, it was not until doctors at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital returned to work at the general ward on Monday that his condition was addressed.  By then he had taken a turn for the worse.  Matura’s family strongly believes that his death may have been the result of an overworked staff.  News Five spoke with Audrey Matura-Shepherd, who is appealing to witnesses of her cousin’s shooting to come forward with information.

Audrey Matura-Shepherd

Audrey Matura-Shepherd, Cousin of Deceased

“When my cousin was able to speak after his first surgery, of course all of us wanted to know what happened because we don’t know him to be someone to be in any trouble.  So that was very surprising to us and he told us that that evening when he was, as usual, at the corner of Orange Street and the canal side by in front of VIP Wireless, he witnessed and older guy harassing a little girl, like about ten years old, and it’s a girl from a family that he knows, and he scolded the guy and intervened, you know, to leave the girl alone.  And the person basically threatened him and said, you know, that he would come back and deal with him.  But he didn’t take it serious and hours later when the store closed and he was still out there, as he usually does, the guy came back with another person and between the two of them they kinda tag teamed him.  He said one distracted him by talking strong to him and the other one came from behind.  When he swung [around] that’s when he saw the gun and that’s when he made to run and that’s when the bullets were fired, I mean the shots were fired and he got hit the worst but two passersby also got grazed. He had really been recovering, recovering fairly well, I mean there were the down moments and the panic moments and so but we had some couple very good weeks with him, you know.  He was a very good patient and he followed every instruction and we did everything we could but [on] Monday, in the night, he kinda started complaining and having labored breathing.  By Tuesday morning [at] three, we got a call from the hospital that he’s getting worse and shortly after that they put him on a ventilator in induced coma and he never came out.  The sad part about that is that we’ve seen how much work the doctors put in and we’ll have to give them credit for that but the reality is that what happens at the hospital is that they’re really stretched to the limits and one of the reasons my cousin got worse is that by the time they moved him from the ICU unit and took him up to the general ward is that on weekends it’s really bad.  They don’t have enough nurses to attend to these people. I think by the time they began their diagnosis the infection that eventually took over his body just spread very fast and it’s so unfortunate because we feel that the hospital invests so much time and the doctors put in so much effort, you know, why should it be the follow-up care that creates the problem?  So while we are thankful for all those who did, we know that better could have been done.”

According to Matura, her cousin, despite having had several conversations with the family following the shooting, could not identify the gunmen by name, but that he would have been able to point them out otherwise.  The police, she said, were lax in their investigation since they anticipated that Wallace Matura would have made a full recovery.