The place was calm yesterday. Too calm, perhaps.

It wasn’t Spanish Town.

And it wasn’t as if there were no people. For there were. Plenty. If not as many as there normally would be.

It was something about how they moved. Fast and furtive, but attempting to appear normal. They were tense, too.

That is what it was. The tension.

It was palpable. It closed in on you. It fell, thick and heavy, from those old red-brick buildings. And from everywhere.

After the killings of recent days, people pushed hard against the tension. Wanting to escape.

“We are closing early,” said one young man as he drew the shutters down at a supermarket on Young street.

It is only 2:00 pm. It is at least three hours before normal closing time.

“Because of the violence in Spanish Town,” he said.

Like many others, he too, will likely be hustling to take one of the route taxis which are doing brisk business all around. Unusually so for early in the afternoon.

But other stores and offices are already closed or are closing. Like the Courts furniture store that is adjacent to Young’s Supermarket.

Schools sent students home early. But there was not that noisy, gregariousness of children who have time off from the classroom.

By dusk, the traffic was almost all gone.

A ghost town. Except for policemen in blue denims from the Special Anti-Crime Task Force and Mobile Reserve patrolling the town that was built by the Spanish and twice served as the Jamaican capital.

In this atmosphere few people are willing to talk. And when they talk, they don’t say much. And they mostly say it in whispers.

And there are a million interpretations of events. Like the reason why the stores are closing early.

“The man threaten them to lock up or else,” a passerby whispers as he hurries along the narrow pavement. He has noticed the young man pulling down the supermarket shutters. And he probably heard the question.

But there is the basic fact that everyone knows. That young men have been firing guns at each other in Spanish Town for several months and that the killings have escalated in recent months.

They know as fact that four persons – three men and a woman – were shot dead in the community of Jones Heights on Saturday while they celebrated at a street-side birthday party. Nobody has bothered to remember whose birthday.

Those killings, by men on foot armed with rifles and pistols, might have been in retaliation for the murder of a vendor in Twickenham Park last Friday.

Another fact is that the shootings in Spanish Town on Tuesday evening left three people dead and four injured. The shootings happened during the busy evening traffic period.

Scores of panicked people ran for cover. Some ran leaving their vehicles, seeking safety elsewhere. Those who heard the shooting claimed that it went on for ages and that the firing came from everywhere.

Two of Tuesday night’s murder victims were fully identified:

. Kenroy Prince, 28 of Jones Avenue; and

. Charmaine Huggins, 49, of St John’s Road.

The third person was identified only as “Stamma”, also of Jones Avenue.

Police say that their killers wore khaki. The uniform of Jamaican schoolboys.

They went into the communities of Jones Avenue, March Pen, Tawes Pen, Ellerslie Pen and Duncan’s Pen firing wildly.

Gun firing was also reported in the area around the bus station at Burke Road.

Prince had gone to a little shop to buy cigarettes. He was shot as he entered the shop. His father, Terrence Prince, wailed uncontrollably yesterday.

“Dem lick out him head back,” the elder Prince said of his son’s injury.

‘Stamma’ was cut down as the gunmen left the shop.

Huggins’ body was found on St John’s Road after the shooting had died down. It was not clear whether she was a deliberate target or was hit by a stray bullet.

Residents of the Jones Avenue area claim that Tuesday night’s shooters were from an are of Spanish Town called Shelta Rock (Jones Heights). They claim that the strike was in retaliation for Saturday night’s birthday celebration killings in their area.

“Me see about seven man with long gun a screechy and me stay inside,” said a teenage boy yesterday “Little after, a whole heap a shot me hear.”

There were debates about whether the violence was the result of inter-gang or intra-gang rivalry and how to deal with the problem.

Spanish Town’s mayor, Raymoth Notice, has called a meeting today of all the town’s “civic-minded’ persons and police officials hoping that they will come up with “the strategies that ought to be implemented”.

“The symptoms of this moment of depression must be addressed urgently,” said Notice. “This is the social situation of those who are most affected by crime and violence in Spanish Town – the poor, unemployed, uneducated. These aspects must be addressed now.’

Councillor Norris Grant of the Crescent Division, agrees, but wants something else. The return of tough cop, Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams, whom human rights groups campaigned vigorously to have removed from the streets.

“I am calling on the commissioner of police (Francis Forbes) to reinstate Senior Superintendent Adams to Spanish Town,” Norris said. “Forget all the differences they (Adams and Forbes) had and send Adams back.”