US airline employee gunned down in Arima

A United States airline employee was gunned down on Thursday night in what police believe are drug-related circumstances. But infuriated relatives of the dead woman, Camelia Nyack, 31, are claiming this is not the truth. “What is said there is wrong, a total misconception. Camelia was not involved in drugs, or any underhand activities, or was she staying in that house,” explained her cousins, angry at the allegations made. “First of all, she was staying here at Carib Homes in Arima. Secondly, if she had known any activity like that went on there, she would have never gone. Camelia met a girl who lives at that house last year Carnival in TT and decided to visit her with a friend before leaving to see the (girlfriend’s) new born baby. “It was under those circumstances. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and since the gunmen probably thought she looked like one of the women who stayed there, she was shot.”

Camelia, a customer services representative with Jet Blue Inter State Airlines in Boston, USA, arrived in TT on February 16 for Carnival celebrations. She was scheduled to leave yesterday at around 5 am to take up duty. On Thursday night at around 9.30, she went to the home of a friend on Sorzano Street in Arima with another friend, Brian Julien, 31, of Clovis Street, Arima. She met the owner of the house, Derrick Achong, 44, and his brother Richard Achong, 42, whom she was talking with when three men climbed over a fence, entered the living room and started shooting wildly. Camelia was shot in her chest and died immediately. Her friend Julien and the two Achong brothers also received several gunshots wounds and are all warded at the Port-of-Spain General Hospital in critical condition.

The Tobago-born separated mother of an 11-year-old girl migrated to Boston 11 years ago and has returned every year since for the last eight years. In Trinidad, she stays every year by her cousins in Arima. “My cousin was not that type of girl. Anyone who knows her will tell you she will go out of her way to help anyone, but drugs and crime was far from her,” continued a frightened cousin. “Camelia was an all-round nice girl, she did not know those people well. It was the first time she went there and it was to see her girlfriend and her new baby. She was not a drug mule as is being said by some people. “It is wrong for people who don’t know her to destroy her reputation like that.” told Newsday they have no motive for the killing, and find the circumstances very bizarre. “Nothing was taken or said which means it was an execution. She was either in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was shot in the hail of bullets, or it was a case of mistaken identity. Its unfortunate she should be killed for something she knows nothing about.”

The cops however promised that no stone will be left unturned to capture her killers. Neither police nor Interpol have any records or anything on her. Meanwhile, the cousins are waiting for her father, who lives in Tobago, and her mother in New York to make funeral arrangements. Autopsy results of a post-mortem performed by Dr Hughvon des Vignes yesterday confirmed death by shock and haemorrhaging consistent with a bullet wound to heart. Sgt Arlene Forde is leading the investigation.