Young shooter chopped to death

Armed with a .38 revolver and a blue pocket-size New Testament, Stafford Mc Dowall stormed a house in Trigger Ridge, Redemption Sharpes, with murder on his mind. He emptied the gun on his target, but the tables turned viciously on him.{{more}}

Mc Dowall, just 20 years old, is dead.

Up to press time, Andy Smith, 24, the man McDowall attacked last Saturday, June 21, was recovering satisfactorily from the two gunshot wounds that he suffered during the daring daylight shooting.

Smith was at his mother’s Trigger Ridge home, sitting on the couch with his three-year-old son, along with other family members, shortly after 3 p.m., when he heard his sister cry out.

A few seconds later, he saw a masked man charge through the front door of the house brandishing a gun.

According to Smith, he put down his son, and almost simultaneously began wrestling with his attacker, unmasking him in the process. By then, he told SEARCHLIGHT, the first two shots had missed him, but the third hit him on the left side of his face, the fourth missed again, but the fifth penetrated his left shoulder.

Smith said that as he tussled with his attacker, the would-be deadly sixth shot missed his head.

“He was aiming for my head,” Smith said.

Smith, who was speaking to SEARCHLIGHT from the balcony of the Male Surgical Ward at the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital, said that during the ordeal all he was thinking about was protecting his

family.

“When the bullets done, he try to run, so ah pick up the cutlass in the porch and chop him in his head,” Smith said.

“Man, my blood was rushing out, I just get dotish, I was scared for my life,” Smith said.

He said that after his attacker fell down, he threw bricks on him and chopped him again.

It is not surprising, considering the ordeal he witnessed, that Smith’s three-year-old son is said to be bawling out hysterically since the incident shouting “It have a man with a gun.”

Smith says that he is thankful to be alive but isn’t afraid of any retaliation for Mc Dowall’s death, which is a likelihood, considering that police believe the incident is part of a community gang warfare.

“I not frightened, no, I ready… I protecting myself,” he said defiantly in a tone unlike that of his worried mother Vivian.

“I urging mothers to talk to their sons. I am always talking to mine. We have to tell them to behave themselves,” she said as she removed the bloodied curtains and other items that bore witness to the horror that unfolded in her house earlier that day.

Vivian has already felt the pain of gang violence. Another of her sons, Glenford Smith, at age 20, was gunned down on May 13, last year, in a footpath in Redemption Sharpes.

“This is real sad. This nonsense is getting out of hand,” said another Redemption Sharpes resident who was on the scene.

“All of them grow up around one another, eat from the same pot. What going on with them?” another resident exclaimed as she tried to make sense of the recent spate of violence that has grabbed the village on the outskirts of the city by the jugular.

The blue New Testament was retrieved from McDowall’s pants pocket by police after the incident.