Murder puts Sherlock residents on edge
Published:Tuesday | September 5, 2023 | 12:11 AMAndre Williams/Staff Reporter
The Hunts Bay police are keeping a close watch on the Sherlock Crescent area of St Andrew following the murder of a 56-year-old man on Sunday.
Dead is 56-year-old Douglas Stewarton, otherwise called ‘Rastaman’, of a Sherlock Crescent, Kingston 20 address.
Reports are that at about 7:20 p.m., Sherlock was standing at his gate when a lone gunman approached and shot him several times before fleeing the scene in a waiting motor vehicle.
Stewarton was pronounced dead at hospital.
A resident of the community told The Gleaner that Stewarton’s death has triggered a sense of unease in the area.
“War out fi start ya now because a same so dem kill his nephew two years ago. A long time him live around here. Me feel it to me heart. That man grow a lot of us,” the resident said.
Gleaner sources identified his nephew as a man known as ‘Kurla’.
Further checks revealed that Kurla was a close associate of Sherrod ‘Yannie’ Holness, whose severed head was delivered to a family in Sherlock Crescent in October 2021.
Holness was said to be a displaced don in the area at the time he was killed. His body was never found.
The police believe that he was killed in St Catherine.
“We don’t want it around here. Is back-to-school time. We don’t need the darkness. A full time now dem stop the foolishness,” one resident said on Monday.
The police believe the latest killing is gang-related.
Nelson Road shooting
Meanwhile, the Hunts Bay police were called to another murder scene on Sunday night, this time on Nelson Road in the Kingston 13 area, where 22-year-old Taje Hinds, otherwise called ‘White Knight’, was shot dead at about 8 p.m.
Residents summoned the police after hearing explosions in the area. When the lawmen arrived, they found Hinds suffering from gunshot wounds to his head.
Up to August 26, the St Andrew South Police Division had recorded a 12 per cent decline in murders when compared to the corresponding period in 2022. There were 79 murders this year, compared to 90 last year.
The national murder toll stood at 899 – an 11 per cent decline year on year.