ST JAMES, Jamaica – Three men were today killed at a cook shop in Norwood, St James, in a brazen shooting attack, which the police say stemmed from a dispute over a cellular phone.

Read: Triple murder in St James

The deceased have been identified as 21-year-old cook shop operator Tyrone Hines, also called Jawbone; 21-year-old Michael Holder, otherwise called Two Chain; and 29-year-old selector Glaeisel Rutherford, also called DJ Davil, all of Paradise, Norwood.

According to head of the St James Police Division Senior Superintendent Steve McGregor, the dispute was triggered by an incident involving Hines and a female customer, after water was accidentally spilled on her cellular phone.

“A dispute developed at the cook shop over water getting into a phone. It was said that the person who owned the phone was dissed by the owner of the shop, and she left and the rest is history. The owner of the cook shop is dead and two innocent bystanders, just over a dispute of water getting into a phone,” SSP McGregor bemoaned.

Meanwhile, the incident attracted a large gathering outside the police tapes, which cordoned off the crime scene. The residents were overheard saying a car drove up from which men alighted and sprayed the business establishment with bullets. The three men were reportedly shot dead on the spot.

“When me hear the gunshot them me think it was people nailing zinc,” one lady was overheard saying to another community member.

A younger woman reflected that a male member of the community fell off a roof from which he was working when the shooting started.

Meanwhile, SSP McGregor lamented that guns are too accessible in St James and that people are too willing to kill as a means of settling disputes in the parish.

“It (the triple killing) tells you how easy the people of St James can access guns. They settle their disputes down here by killing each other,” an upset McGregor stated. “We are trying to get the guns off them, we are trying to meet with the people in the different communities to see how we can get them to be more humane in how they relate to each other.

“We have been reaching out to the other social agencies, the churches, to come in because they settle disputes by killing each other in this parish,” he continued.

He appealed to people close to the deceased to refrain from taking revenge and told reporters that the police have started a search for the individual who was involved in the dispute that triggered the deadly attack.

“We are now looking for a somebody who was a part of that dispute, because probably if we don’t find that person before others, you might get another murder out of it. We know who we are looking for and we are doing that,” the senior cop stated.

“We are trying to appeal to the relatives and friends of these who are dead to leave it to us so that we don’t have any continuation of this nature.”

Horace Hines