A suspect was arrested, and members of a household offered protective custody after a man was gunned down in Layou on Saturday while coming from his father’s funeral.
The dead man has been identified as Oranson Garraway, a 26-year-old resident of the Central Leeward town.
Garraway was shot multiple times near Didips Hideout while walking along the main road from the cemetery, where his father was buried in the Layou mountains.
There was much tension in Layou after the killing, with a large crowd gathering outside a house as people speculated about the perpetrators and the cause of the killing.
Heavily armed officers from the Special Service Unit were on duty outside the house, even as detectives from the Major Crime Unit processed the scene of the homicide several hundred yards away.
Police later escorted the occupants of the house away, reportedly for their safety.
Elsewhere along the road between the house and the murder scene, one man commented that the police “have more yellow tape to pull”, suggesting that there is likely to be more killings in Layou.
People speculated that Garraway’s death is connected to the homicides that Layou recorded in 2023, when the town recorded four murders in six weeks, after about five years without any homicides there.
During the killing in 2023, a brother of one of the murder victims had survived an attempt on his life, and his father’s vehicle was set on fire along the main road outside their house.
Then, last year, gunmen attempted to kill the same murder victim’s mother, who escaped by fleeing into a church.
Garraway made news headlines before his death, beginning in 2020, when he was jailed for four years for assault and possession of an unlicensed firearm and ammunition.
The sentence resulted from an incident in which Garraway had used the Facebook page “Vincy: Buy, Sell and Trade” to lure a Mesopotamia woman to Layou to buy a dirt bike from “a woman”.
On June 17, 2020, Garraway posed as the son of the woman and arranged to meet the would-be buyer at whom he brandished a homemade firearm.
The woman ran to the Rapid Response Unit base in Layou and officers responded, arresting Garraway.
They searched him and found the firearm on his person.
Then, in January 2021, Garraway was discharged on a number of robbery charges after the police failed to complete their investigations six months after the charges had been laid.
Garraway is the third person in St. Vincent and the Grenadines to die of gunshot injuries in two days.
On Thursday, Michael Richards aka Boxer, a 26-year-old labourer, of Diamond, died at the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital, where he was being treated since April 1, when he was shot on Murray’s Road, Kingstown.
Then, about 5:10 p.m., on Thursday, police responded a report of a shooting incident along the Diamond Main Road, where they met the body Diazhaun Jack, a 20-year-old labourer, of Diamond, who sustained multiple gunshot wounds.
Garraway’s death brings the homicide count in St. Vincent and the Grenadines this year to nine.
The country recorded 54 homicides in 2024 and a record 55 the previous year.
Is this a case of Garrway chickens have come home to roost and is sitting in the mortuary. Gunman where you get your gun from you must be getting it from a foreign land. This is a warning to all would be gunslingers that one they your Karma will bear fruits.