Montego Bay, St James – The police, up until late yesterday, had still not established a motive for Wednesday’s brutal slaying of four men and the injuring of two other persons, including a teenaged girl, at Golden Heights in Green Pond, St James.

According to the police, five heavily armed men invaded the community at about 9:15 Wednesday night and opened fire on occupants at a shop, killing 34-year-old Rayon Mendez, also called ‘Oily’; a man known only as Gavin, and injured another 36-year-old man.

The gunmen, the police said, then went about 80 metres from the shop to a house where they shot 21-year-old Edgar Martin, also called ‘Ron’, of neighbouring Salt Spring; and Nathaniel Gibbs, known as ‘Dreddy’ of Rose Heights, and injured the 14-year-old girl. Martin, Mendez and Gavin died on the spot while Gibbs was pronounced dead at hospital.

Yesterday, a pall of gloom hung over the community as residents tried to make sense of the bloodletting. They could not identify a motive for the killings. The brutal attack, they said, seemed random and indiscriminate.

Mendez’s common-law wife, Jenestine Miller, 27 tried to comfort her one-year-old son, Rayon Mendez Jr, who clung to her shoulders and kept calling out “Daddy”, “Daddy” intermittently as he stared toward the gate of the family home, a few metres from the shop where his father was killed.

Her six-year-old daughter ran around the yard smiling, seemingly oblivious to the horror of the night before, but later drew a picture and brought it to show her mother, telling her it was “the devil”. Miller said the little girl, who was allowed to stay home from school yesterday, was inconsolable Wednesday night after receiving news of the death of her father.

“She just kept crying, crying. But she tell mi ‘mommy, the spirit will go with us’,” said Miller.

She said she heard the shots from her verandah, but thought Mendez was ok as he was supposed to be outside putting an engine in his car. She was frightened, she said, to find out he was at the shop. “Mi tell him nuh fi go up deh,” she lamented. “Mi tell him,” she repeated, a blank stare on her face as her one-year-old son rested his head on her shoulders.

It was the same advice a friend of Gavin said he had given to him. His friend, who did not wish to be named, said Gavin – who was in his mid to late 20s had relocated from Ocho Rios in St Ann and had been staying with his uncle in the community.

“Mi tell him nuh fi hang out up deh, because him nuh have nobody here.” He said Gavin was a jovial and hard-working person. “Him find it hard fi survive in di country (St Ann) so him come down here,” he told the Observer.

Gibbs’ girlfriend, 33-year-old Nadine Anderson, who is also the mother of his two children – an eight-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy – described him as a quiet and jovial person. “Him nuh trouble nobody,” said Anderson, who Gibbs was visiting in Green Pond at the time of his death.

She said she could think of no reason for anyone to kill him.

“A dung a di shop di shooting start and den dem come up here,” she said, unable to come to grips with the horror.