Saturday’s double homicide in Marchand has prompted calls from distraught family members of the deceased for an end to the deadly gun violence surge in Saint Lucia.
Police identified the deceased as Black Mallet residents Evitus Lynch Junior alias ‘Red Boy’ and twenty-year-old Thaddeus Denis alias ‘Coco Boy’.
They sustained fatal gunshot injuries on Marchand Road.
The mother of Thaddeus Denis called for an end to the violence plaguing the country.
“All I want to say to the young guys out there, ‘You all need to stop. Put down the guns. We need to pray’,” Lisa Charles told reporters.
“It needs to stop – the gangs, being in bad company, it needs to stop,” Charles declared.
She explained that parents speak to their children, but bad companions influence the youngsters.
Nevertheless, Charles said parents must continue admonishing their children.
She recalled losing another son three years ago, explaining that it was hard to bear a child and then have to bury him.
“I am empty inside. I am broken,” the mother told reporters, adding that she had not eaten since the fatal shooting on Saturday and was praying to God for the strength to cope.
Meanwhile, the father of Evitus Lynch Junior recalled that with the young man’s death, he had now lost two sons and his child-mother to gun violence.
The son and child-mother were among three individuals killed in a 2021 drive-by shooting in Marchand.
Junior, the second son who succumbed on Saturday, died without witnessing the birth of his child.
“I miss my child-father and he not even there to see his unborn child,” Junior’s girlfriend lamented.
She echoed calls for the violence to stop, declaring that Junior was not a bad individual.
“He have his ways, but he was a good man,” the girlfriend recalled, adding that the deceased cared for his children.
“He wasn’t a violent person,” she stated.
Photo: (L to R) Evitus Lynch Junior and Thaddeus Denis
