Jamaica dripped blood last year through a series of heinous crimes that kept the country on edge and put crime on almost everyone’s list of the top three problems facing the nation.

Although fewer persons were killed last year – 975 persons compared with 1,045 in 2002 – the brutality of some murders committed over the 12-month period and the alarming number of multiple murders painted a grim picture of wanton killing fields.

It was a year in which multiple murders grabbed the headlines, although the Constabulary Communications Network, the information arm of the police, did not have ready statistics on the exact number.

The triple murder which drew the most media attention involved the shooting of three men, Derron Crawford, also called ‘Pound’, Glasford Collins, also called ‘Mr X’, and Howard Fuller, who were shot dead along the Temple Hall main road in October.

Police say the men were killed because of a dispute between political rivals over road work in the area and questioned People’s National Party activist and area don, Milton “Tony” Welch, in connection with the incident. Welch was not charged.

The triple murder sparked a massive protest in Stony Hill square the following day and resulted in the death of 22-year-old, Fitzroy Witter, alias “little Wicked’, who was shot by cops who said he, Witter fired at them. A .38 revolver with four live rounds was taken from Witter’s body the cops said.

The parish of St Catherine, mainly the municipality of Portmore and the old capital of Spanish Town, experienced its heavy share of murders.

In mid-December, as if to slap police in the face for celebrating a drop in the murder rate, five men were killed in the Jobs Lane area when three men alighted from a car and opened fire at a group of persons gathered in front of a shop. Four other persons were shot and injured during the incident.

The multiple murder highlighted a week which saw eight persons being murdered over a one-week period, in Spanish Town.

Just days after the Jobs Lane massacre, three persons were slain inside an ice cream parlour in the heart of Spanish Town and in March, five persons were shot and killed in the old capital over a three-day period.

The slaughter continued in Spanish Town when three men were shot dead and five others injured in five hours on September 13.

Another triple murder occurred at Grange Lane in Portmore in August, when, after responding to reports of gunfire in the area, police stumbled upon the bodies of Andrew Hagigal, 29, of Richmond Hill, Andrew Suer, 29 and Dave Myers, both of Annotto Bay, St Mary.

The bodies all had multiple gunshot wounds and police investigators reported that the men were killed execution-style.

Then in October, three persons were shot and killed in Portmore in one weekend while in November three more were murdered over a nine-hour period. Among the dead was Prince Ellis, 56 year-old father of 11 and managing director of Nimrod Security firm.

Ellis, who was also a district constable and a Justice of the Peace, was approached by two men as he accompanied a female friend home in the Marine Park area and was shot in the upper body, police reported.

The killings continued in Portmore with two Hawkeye security guards, a construction worker and a swimming instructor all shot and killed within days.

The Corporate Area refused to be outdone. In the sprawling slums of the troubled inner cities, the guns constantly barked their eerie message of death and mayhem.

In March, the Eastern St Andrew community of Kintyre was rocked with the gun-slaying of three men who were sitting outside a wholesale establishment and were attacked by four armed men travelling in a green Nissan Sunny motorcar, and who fired a volley of shots. A fourth man was shot and critically injured in the incident.

Gang violence then exploded in the Mountain View area and saw a deadly battle between gangs from the Jarrett Lane and Saunders Avenue areas exchanging high-powered rifle fire with men from the Jacques Road area. The gang war resulted in over 20 people being murdered over a one-month period.

The war also forced the police to maintain a constant presence in the area. Not intimidated by the police presence, the marauding gunmen invaded each other’s turf and continued the wanton bloodletting, taking six more lives.

A brutal war in the ‘Tel Aviv’ area also forced the security forces to erect a police post in the community to stem the violence which claimed 28 lives last year.

In St James, the death toll surpassed the 100 mark as the second city experienced a continuing upsurge in crime.

Children were not exempt from the violence and in what could be ranked as the most heinous crime of the year, a five year-old boy was burnt to death after a Hanover resident torched a car in which the child and a female teacher were sitting. The woman managed to escape but the boy died before assistance could reach him.

A man also attacked his three daughters, aged 6, 11 and 16, and chopped them mercilessly while they slept in a house in Kingston. The machete-wielding attacker, Wilfred “Bigga” Bryan, then tried to hang himself but was cut down by cops at the scene. He died two days later in hospital.

Bryan had attacked the children after he had stabbed their mother in the chest and left her for dead in bushes at Stony Hill, St Andrew.

Though badly mutilated, neither the children nor their mother succumbed to their wounds.

Sworn to uphold the law, members of the island’s constabulary forces were responsible for taking 113 lives, while 13 policemen were killed in 2003.

The most notable cop-killings include that of Inspector Ansel Dwyer, who was stabbed 79 times in November. Dwyer’s service pistol was stolen in the incident and his car was found partially burnt in the May Pen area. Three persons are now in police custody and facing the courts in connection with Dwyer’s murder.

Constable Devon Pearson of the Greater Portmore police went missing after signing off duty in August. His disappearance sparked a massive search for his remains, which ended in September when fishermen found his badly decomposed torso on the banks of an islet in the delta of the Rio Cobre.

The head, arms and legs were all missing from the cop’s body and he was only identified after a series of DNA tests which were conducted overseas.

Corporal Headley Davis, the sixth cop to be killed last year, was shot at least nine times after stumbling on a robbery in progress at a business place at Slipe Road in Kingston. Davis was slain as his wife and another female companion looked on.

The now notorious gun-battle in which the over 80 officers were pinned down for hours by gunmen in the Canterbury area of the North Cost resort city of Montego Bay, must go down as one of the highlights of the 2003 crime year. During the incident, police killed three men and recovered six guns along with a quantity of ammunition. Nineteen men were also arrested during the Canterbury incident.

But the police were also involved in controversial killings which sparked massive protests.

In May, four persons, including two women, were killed by members of the now disbanded Crime Management Unit (CMU) in the rustic village of Crawle, Clarendon.

The killings caused widespread public outrage and resulted in the scrapping of the CMU and the transfer of its popular leader, Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams, to a desk job.

The police again came under the microscope when Renee Lyons, a 10 year-old girl, was shot and killed by an errant police bullet as she played in the depressed Majesty Gardens community, St Andrew in July.

Allegations are that a cop was shooting at a young man who was fleeing with a ganja spliff when the girl was hit. As a result of the massive demonstration which followed, the police paid the funeral expenses of the child and offered counselling to her relatives, while removing the cop involved from front line duty.

Among the most outrageous shooting incidents involving the police was the shooting death of two senior citizens and the injuring of another by police in the Flankers community of Montego Bay. David Baccas, 62, and Cecil Brown 63, were killed as they travelled in Baccas’ car in the early hours of October 25. Police claimed the men were killed in a crossfire between them and maurading gunmen.

The killings also sparked a massive protest demonstration which caused nervous moments among tourism interests in the area. The police officers involved were also taken off front line duty.

The Bureau of Special Investigations is probing all of the mentioned police killings.

And not surprisingly, guns again figured predominantly in the widespread shedding of Jamaican blood. During last year, 517 guns and 10,860 rounds of assorted ammunition were recovered by the police islandwide. Rifles accounted for 24 of that amount while 11 shotguns, 95 homemade guns, 123 revolvers, 245 pistols and 19 submachine guns were also recovered.

Many of the killings during 2003 were linked to drug-running. The narcotics police seized 1,582,572 kilograms of cocaine and 36,122,66 kilograms of ganja last year. A total of 5,943 persons were arrested for drug-related offenses, while 444,639 hectares of ganja and an illegal drug laboratory were destroyed.

Traffic accidents accounted for 373 deaths. In one of the most memorable traffic accident, three children, Anakay Roberts, 12; Carlton Carty, nine and their little brother Devonte, were mowed down in June as they stood waiting for transportation along the Prospect main Road in St Thomas. Police reported that one of two taxi drivers, who were racing along the wet roadway, lost control of his vehicle and plowed into the children.

Both drivers were charged as a result of the incident.