‘Terrorist’ Trini shot 28 times in Philadelphia

A 24-year-old Trinidadian, who was wanted for making terrorist threats in the United States in September 2001, was shot 28 times in a so-called police shootout in Philadelphia last week. Haile Payne, a Muslim,  was wanted 11 days after the September 11 terrorists bombings in New York, Washington DC and Philadelphia. He was shot dead by three policemen while handcuffed, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Payne’s father Rennison, 46, knew that his son was killed, but nothing could have prepared him for the sight of the wounds inflicted by the barrage of shots — 28 in all — that three officers fired. “I saw my son full of holes. So many holes I couldn’t even count,” he said. “I’m not saying my son was an angel. I’m saying it’s an injustice to fire 28 shots at one individual. At what point did he not become a threat?” asked Payne, throwing his hands in the air in exasperation during an interview at his home in East Germantown Payne, a native of Trinidad, came to Philadelphia when he was 12. He enlisted in the Army in 1985, serving a tour of duty in Korea as a unit armorer. He and his wife, Ann Marie, 42, raised their three sons here after she arrived with them from Trinidad in 1987.

Haile Payne’s death was the second tragedy to strike the family in nine months. On September 11, 2003 their oldest son, Imanuel Payne, 24, was found around 4:20 am slumped in the front passenger seat of a 1995 Lexus in a South Philadelphia parking lot. He had been fatally shot in the head. Police found no motive for that killing and have made no arrests. Rennison Payne said investigators notified him the day after Haile Payne’s death. “They came to see me that Friday and they haven’t been back since,” he said bitterly. He said officers told him his son was involved in a shootout: “They said, ‘he shot one of us, so they shot him up.’ He said he makes no excuses for his son’s actions. But what happened, he said, “is still an injustice. The police need to police the police.”