‘Miserable’ boy, 14, killed over woman

AN ARGUMENT over a woman is said to be the reason for the shooting death of 14-year-old Maurice Mota, who was killed in the wee hours of yesterday morning inside Jazzy’s Pub, Western Main Road, St James. But the boy’s mother Ann Marie yesterday charged that she never knew her eldest child had a girlfriend and further stated that Maurice was “a very, very harden child who often ran away from home.”

The mother of four, of Fort George Road, St James, said she had no idea her son was at Jazzy’s Pub and pointed out that he had left home since 4 pm Saturday telling her he was going to see his grandmother, Doreen Tyrell, at her Jeffrey Street, Ross Lands, St James, home. Police reports on the fatal shooting are that around 2.30 am yesterday, Mota was at Jazzy’s Pub when he got into an argument with one of the patrons, said by eyewitnesses to be a teenager himself. The argument, according to police, was over a woman who was said to be dancing with both Mota and the assailant.

An eyewitness told Newsday that the woman was clad in a red jersey and black pants. Police said after the argument, the man with whom Mota argued, left and went downstairs the pub returning shortly after with a firearm. The assailant then shot Mota to the back of his head while he was sitting on a chair in the verandah area overlooking the Western Main Road. The gunman then hurriedly left the scene of the crime, police said. Someone inside the pub called the Emergency-999 after which a party of officers from the Western Division headed by Supt Maxime and including ASP Julius, Insp Anthony Lezama, Sgt Nandram Moonilal, Cpl Dass and PCs Charles and Rose visited the scene and conducted investigations.

Mota was taken via an Emergency Health Services (EHS) ambulance to the Port-of-Spain General Hospital where he died while being attended to. “He was very, very harden and miserable. He just going all about the place and when I think he here, he somewhere else,” Ann Marie Mota said of her son. Speaking from the Ross Lands area with a young child in hand, Ann Marie said that after her son left home Saturday evening on the pretext of going by his grandmother, she went to a wedding and returned home around 10 pm that day. “He was not home,” Ann Marie said, adding that sometime yesterday morning, her son’s father, Irving Tyrell, came and told her the bad news. “I went and see him in the hospital and he had a very big hole in his head,” Ann Marie said. She also said she heard the talk about the woman, but that she never heard Mota speak about a girlfriend.

Puffing hard on a cigarette, Irving Tyrell said he wants the police to catch his son’s killer and bring him to justice, before he catches him. “They better not make me catch him you know,” he said, sitting on some steps. Tyrell said further that his son was very miserable but that the killer could have “hit him two slaps and send him home.” Other residents who had gathered around the family described the incident as an assassination and appealed to the police to find the killer fast. No arrests had been made up to late evening and Sgt Moonilal of the St James Criminal Investigations Depart-ment is leading the probe.