Ex-con shot dead by cops

“HE WAS no Angel, but they did not have to kill him,” Joan Wallace cried as she recounted to Newsday how police gunned down her 37-year-old ex-convict son, Kevin Wallace. Police are claiming that around 11.30 am, they shot Wallace after he attacked them with a cutlass under a house at Ethel Street, La Romaine, San Fernando. According to reports, a party of San Fernando CID officers confronted Wallace under his house and he whipped out a cutlass. Wallace ran towards the officers, one of whom drew his service pistol and fired twice. One of the bullets struck Wallace in the chest and he fell to the ground.

Wallace was placed in an unmarked police vehicle and taken to San Fernando General Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Newsday arrived at the scene 15 minutes after the shooting to witness a mob of angry CEPEP workers and villagers assembled on the roadway shouting at police officers who were at the scene. Wallace’s mother, Joan who is a CEPEP worker, complained that police frequently harassed her son. “Look the cutlass here. All his cutlasses home,” the emotional woman shouted.

CEPEP worker Hamza Abdul, related how he saw a white B15 Sentra pull up in front of Wallace’s house. “About four police with guns jumped out of the car firing shots without warning. Like the boy get shoot when he was jumping over the wall and he fall in the neighbour’s yard,” Abdul said. One neighbour told Newsday when Wallace was shot she heard him moaning, “Ah dead, oh God ah dead.” Wallace spent ten years in jail for robbery and was recently charged with possession of marijuana and using obscene language. Acting Supt Elvin Noel is conducting an investigation into the killing.