74-year-old man shot, killed execution style at Stubbs

When you live to be 74 years old, you are expected to die of natural causes or some health related illness, not a gunshot to the head.

That’s the view of at least one person who had gathered at the Stubbs Polyclinic on Tuesday afternoon to bond with the relatives of this country’s 23rd murder victim for 2016, 74-year-old Georgetown and Stubbs resident Errol Sutton.

Sutton was shot around noon last Tuesday, October 11, by a lone gunman, who fired three shots into the elderly man’s head while he was making his way to the Stubbs Police Station to return an injury/medical report form.{{more}}

According to Corlene McDonald, Sutton’s niece, on Tuesday, her uncle was on a piece of land that he owns in Stubbs when he was attacked, allegedly by two men.

She explained that Sutton was chopped on his finger, hand and toe and as a result, fell over and bruised parts of his body. McDonald said that after being wounded, the elderly man went to the police station, where he was given a form to take to the Stubbs Polyclinic. It was while returning the form that he was shot and killed.

McDonald said that her uncle and some other landowners in the area had a longstanding dispute over land and the matter had even gone to court.

“He’s a nice person; he never been in fighting all the years growing up in Stubbs; he never trouble people,” stressed McDonald, who revealed that her uncle lived in the United States for over 20 years before returning here a few years ago.

McDonald, who witnessed the brazen daylight shooting of her uncle, said that since the incident she has not been able to sleep. She said that this is the second time in her life that she has witnessed someone being gunned down.

The other incident occurred in Laventille, Trinidad, when she saw a man being gunned down the same way her uncle was.

Explaining how she managed to be with her uncle the day he was killed, McDonald said that she had gone to Kingstown on Tuesday and while there, she received a call telling her that her “favourite” uncle was wounded in a cutlass attack.

She took a van to Stubbs and when she got out at the clinic, she was told by a woman that Sutton had already left the clinic and so she jumped back into the van and on her way home, she saw her uncle walking on the Stubbs main road. McDonald asked the van to pick up Sutton and they both stopped at the gap leading to the Stubbs Police Station.

McDonald said that Sutton was walking very fast and she was asking him to wait for her, but he was angry about being attacked, so he was hurrying and talking loudly.

“I was telling him don’t talk so loud because the guys who he claimed attacked him were listening to him. They were on a porch with some other people listening and he was saying, imagine two young man chop me up on me own land,” recalled McDonald.

The angry, scared and confused woman said that as they made their way to the police station, she saw a man running towards her uncle and she was screaming at Sutton to run, but Sutton said that he was not afraid of the person and that he was not afraid to die.

McDonald said that she saw the man shoot her uncle in his head three times before running away.

“I tried to alert him and he was saying he not scared. I screamed when he got shot. The police came and took him in a vehicle, but he seemed to have taken his last breath while they were putting him in the van,” said McDonald, while awaiting the results of her uncle’s autopsy on Wednesday at the morgue at the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital (MCMH).

“This make me feel real funny, because is me uncle and he took care of me all the days of my life. I used to go everywhere with him, to the doctor all over. He was a diabetic,” said McDonald, who noted that Sutton would have celebrated his 75th birthday in November.

The police are investigating the circumstances surrounding Sutton’s death, but up to press time no one had been charged.(LC)