Shocked residents of Goldsmith Villa in August Town congregate outside the house where gunmen executed four men early yesterday morning. (Photo: Bryan Cummings)

Gunmen coldly executed four men - including one over 70 - in the community of Goldsmith Villa in August Town, St Andrew in the pre-dawn of Sunday, raising fears of worsening violence in an area where tension started to rise during the election season.

Last night, the police were maintaining a strong presence in the area, hoping to prevent retaliatory killings, which are likely to be aimed at the nearby community of Hermitage. Goldsmith Villa and Hermitage, some of whose residents have been in conflict for weeks, are divided by a narrow gully.
Police identified the victims as:

. Lester Duckett, 74;
. Duckett's stepson, Damion Whyte, 22;
. Tomlin Hibbert, 31; and
. Anthony Bryan, 20.

According to residents of Goldsmith Villa, more than 20 gunmen went into their community just after 3:00 am on Sunday and kicked open the front door of a house where Duckett and his family lived.
Whyte was shot inside the house, but the gunmen dragged Duckett, Hibbert and Bryan outside and sprayed them with bullets at the front door. The gunmen also fired shots into a nearby house. The potch marks from gunshots were evident. One bullet hit a stove.

"My son was in the living-room sleeping," said the woman who lives there.
"Thank God the noise did not wake him up."
Duckett apart, the men had just returned from a club and were having a conversation at the house.
Some residents believe that it was the same gunmen who were responsible for the earlier shooting death, in Bertha Lane, Papine of a 22-year-old woman, Trudy Coombs.

"The same gunman them kill her," one man told the Observer. "So is five people they kill overall."
The shooting was reported to have lasted for several minutes and happened while the police maintained a curfew not far away.
Whyte's brother, Marcus Russell, said that he had to run for his life when the gunmen came.
"Suppose you see what they do with me brother and stepfather," he said.

Yesterday, the police said the killings were in retaliation for Saturday's shooting and injuring of four men in the Hermitage area.
There was bewilderment and anger in Goldsmith Villa yesterday and several hours after the incident, many people still converged at the death scene.
Among them was Hibbert's common-law wife, Christine Whylie, who is eight months pregnant with their second child. This will be her fourth child.

"He was such a nice person," Whylie said.
Hibbert, she said, was a hard-working man who drove and operated backhoes for a living.
"He worked hard to support us," she said. "He wasn't a bad person."
Bryan's father, Randal Bryan, smoked a marijuana cigarette.

He was attempting, Randal Bryan said, to behave normal because there was no way "to bring me son back".
Several persons placed some of the blame for the killings on the police, complaining that earlier in the night the police had warned them to stay indoors because of a curfew.

"Instead, the gunman them curfew the area and kill off four (of our) friends," one woman said.
But yesterday, Constabulary Communication Network head, Inspector James Forbes, told the Observer that a curfew was actually in force "some three-quarters of a mile away" in August Town.
Forbes could not immediately ascertain whether Goldsmith Villa should have been under a curfew and whether residents had been told that.

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