‘Joel, a good son’

According to police, around 9.55 pm, several loud explosions were heard and when residents checked, they found 16-year-old Joel Huggins motionless in a doorway. He had received three bullets to the chest and one to the head. Police recovered four spent shells and two projectiles at the scene.

Joel is the third Success Laventille student to be killed for the year.

In January, Denilson Smith, 17, and Mark Richards, 15, were shot dead by an unknown gunman along Picton Road in broad daylight.

They were still in their uniforms having just finished classes for the day.

Joel’s mother, Janelle Hutchinson-Huggins, told Sunday Newsday that, at the time of her son’s murder she had gone to visit a neighbour a few buildings away. It was then that she heard gunshots. “My belly just felt at that moment, that something was wrong and within five minutes I got a phone call that Joel had been shot. I just started running and when I got home he was lying in a pool of blood,” she said.

She added that her four-year-old daughter was home at the time and did not see what happened. However, when she heard the gunshots she went outside and seeing her brother on the ground, begged a neighbour to help him.

Hutchinson-Huggins said she was told that someone had called out at the front of the house which worried Joel enough to tell his sister that he was going to a neighbour’s home to call his mother on her cell phone. He then went out the back door where he was shot. She did not know what he heard to frighten him.

Describing her third child of eight, Hutchinson- Huggins said Joel loved agriculture and animals, could fix almost anything, and hated math. “He was a child who was not in anything.

Every stray dog or cat he finds he brings them home to mind. He loves to plant food. He had good aspirations.

As he’s in Form Five he would go by his aunt to do his SBAs every Sunday,” he stated.

Hutchinson-Huggins admitted that she had an older son who was “giving some problems.” She was upset that some media outlets stated that Joel was liming with his older brother at the time, and that the brother ran away when he saw the gunman, leaving Joel behind.

Some sources also stated the gunman went to kill the older brother, but killed Joel instead.

However, Hutchinson- Huggins stressed that her older son was not on the compound at the time, as he had moved out over two months ago. In fact, she said she was the one to call her older son to inform him of Joel’s death.

“When I gave him the news he broke down and said he was coming now.

When I saw him later he asked, ‘Mummy this happened because of me?’ but the truth is we don’t know. His brother is totally broken. He messaged me and asked what he should do but I told him to leave justice in God’s hand. That’s how Joel would have wanted it,” she said.

She added that earlier that day Joel had “an altercation” with a neighbour and so could not pinpoint a motive.

Hutchinson-Huggins also said she had received a visit from Laventille East/Morvant MP Adrian Leonce and San Juan West councillor Jodi Johnson, and they offered to do what they could to assist.

“This is beyond a sad case because he was a good boy. From the comments of his teachers and peers he was not one to give any kind of trouble. It is unfortunate what happened,” Leonce told Sunday Newsday during a telephone interview.

He said he was looking into how he could assist Hutchinson- Huggins through the Ministry of Planning and Development in terms of counselling and funeral arrangements.

He noted that he also contacted Education Minister Anthony Garcia, and they may visit the school tomorrow to speak to the students and teachers and ensure they too received counselling.

“This school is going through a lot of trauma. It is not a normal thing to be losing so many of your classmates or students,” he said.

He noted that while the Government’s School Improvement Programme, which was launched at Success Laventille on October 8, was geared towards the development of students in at-risk areas and their output, the programme also had an aspect of social intervention.

“This situation is isolated from the school, not related to school violence or anything like that. However, Joel, being a student, his death would affect his classmates and teachers and the social intervention parts of the programme are geared to improving the impact of social issues.

This would be one of them,” he said.