MAN WHO WAS CHOPPED, SHOT AND BURNT IN CASSAVA PIECE WAS WARNED BEFORE HE WAS MURDERED

Murdered man was warned he would be killed

Pastor at the Church of God of Prophecy in Cassava Piece Pearlene Lawrence points to the burnt-out house where Lorenza Thomas was killed by gunmen. (Photo: Garfield Robinson)

Hours before gunmen shot and chopped Lorenza Thomas to death, then set his body ablaze at his home in Cassava Piece, St Andrew, yesterday, members of his family had warned him that gangsters wanted to kill him.

But the 23-year-old insisted that he was not involved in “anything” and that gunmen had no reason to want him dead.

Police report that around 3:30 am, armed men kicked open the door to Thomas’s house. Residents of the community said his father, who was at the house, was ordered by the men to flee the scene “because a him son them did want”.

The killers shot Thomas before using a machete to chop him several times, then set him ablaze.

Yesterday, Superintendent Glenford Miller of the Constant Spring Police Station told the Jamaica Observer that tensions were high between warring factions in the community.

When the Observer visited Thomas’s mother’s house in the community, she was too overcome with emotion to speak.

His aunt, Georgette Farquharson, said she last saw her nephew around 3:30 pm on Monday when he left work to get a haircut. She said she later called him around 6:00 pm as she had received word of a threat on his life.

“My little nephew come tell mi say somebody out the road see him and tell him that they were going to kill Chulups,” Farquharson related, with tears in her eyes.

She said, after telling him what they had heard, the family urged Thomas to leave the community, but their pleas fell on deaf ears.

Farquharson said the family had planned to take Thomas to the police station to report the matter and then smuggle him out of the community. However, calls to her nephew’s phone went unanswered for the rest of the evening.

Yesterday morning she was greeted with the news of his gruesome death.

“Mi get a call this morning say the house burn down and that a body was inside and all mi could think was, why? Why Chulups make this happen to him and mi tell him?” she said.

While Farquharson spoke with the Observer, Thomas’s distraught mother exited her small house.

“Mi want to see Chulups, mi a go look for him now,” she said, just before collapsing at the gate.

She was assisted back inside by family members.

Although Farquharson said that she could not “swear” for her nephew, she was puzzled about the reason he had been pursued by gunmen, who, she said, had attempted to kill him in August last year.

“He was outside with his friend and gunman just pass and shoot them up,” she said, adding that, while Thomas had survived the attack, his friend had not been as fortunate.

She said, too, after that incident Thomas had fled the inner-city community and only just returned in April.

“Chulups was loving. Mi nuh know him as a bad man. Wi couldn’t even slap the children while he was around,” she said.

Her sister, Codine Bernard, agreed and described Thomas as “kind”.

“Even when him get shot the other day him wouldn’t leave him friend behind; he took him up and carried him inside,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes.

Pastor at the Church of God of Prophecy in Cassava Piece, Pearlene Lawrence, had a message for the wrongdoers in the community.

“Those who killed this young man will meet their maker. They will go to Him, He will not come to them. God is still within this community and those who are fighting the residents here are fighting a losing battle,” said the elderly woman.

Lawrence then started praying and called on God to protect the residents and stop the spate of violence plaguing the community.