Woman shot and killed at Gurley Hill, Rockies

The sound of a single gunshot pierced the air inside a shop at Gurley Hill, Rockies, on Saturday, August 4, around 3 a.m., sending two persons scampering and one to the floor.

And when the chaos subsided, the person on the floor was identified as 39-year-old Elizabeth ‘Bay Bay’ Bacchus. She was dead, killed by a gunshot to the back.

“We were very, very, close. It is very hard for me to get over. It would take a while for me to get over this. I don’t think this will go unpaid,” Elizabeth’s mother Sylvia ‘Sil’ Bacchus told SEARCHLIGHT on Monday.

Sylvia ‘Sil’ Bacchus

Sylvia said that on Saturday morning, she was at home in Sion Hill when Elizabeth’s boyfriend phoned her and told her Elizabeth was dead.

“I began to cry, and I left home and asked a neighbour for a ride and he took me to the scene,” recalled Sylvia.

She said that when she got to Gurley Hill, it was explained to her that her daughter was at a shop with two other persons when someone shot her.

“It is so sad. I don’t mind if she had died from natural causes, but seeing someone take her life, I don’t think she deserve it, she don’t deserve it at all… knowing the person she be, very loving and everything,” Sylvia said, adding that Elizabeth, who was the mother of one daughter, had just celebrated her 39th birthday on July 19.

She said that she last spoke to Elizabeth on July 31, and she was in high spirits as usual.

“Persons found guilty of murder should be hanged. Too much murder, things out of control, because there was another murder in Rockies recently.

“They using a lot of guns in Rockies. The same night of her death a man was robbed of six dollars and a watch and other things. It is terrible up in that community, very very terrible,” stressed Sylvia.

She said that an autopsy revealed that the bullet hit Elizabeth on her right side, travelled upward, grazed her heart and stuck in her left breast.

“If she had survived she would have been crippled. She never do anything to anybody,” said the emotional mother, who revealed that she had six children and lost another daughter to a brain tumour a few years ago.

“She was my only daughter, now she gone too,” a sad Sylvia said.

Elizabeth’s daughter Aaliah did not want to comment about her mother’s death and only offered, “seeing like how we going through a lot of pain right now, they going to meet it worse than us”, she said of the person or persons responsible for her mother’s death.

Elizabeth was employed as a cleaner at the American University in New Montrose and has gone down in history as the 18th murder here for 2018, and the second person killed in the community of Rockies in less than two weeks.

Murando Williams, a 36-year-old labourer of Frenches, was shot on Tuesday, July 24, at about 9:15 p.m. in the East Kingstown constituency.