A 29-year-old man is dead and an 18-year-old is fighting for his life in hospital after a drive-by shooting on a road directly opposite the Potters Primary School on Sunday morning — the most brazen act of gun violence in a summer that has already produced an extraordinary toll of shootings, armed robberies, and targeted attacks on young people across Antigua and Barbuda.
The double shooting occurred at approximately 10:45 a.m. The 29-year-old man, identified as a Guyanese national known as Leo, died at the scene. Residents reported hearing at least four gunshots before finding the victim on the ground. The 18-year-old was rushed to hospital by the Emergency Medical Services in critical condition.
Police cordoned off the area and are processing the scene. A motive for the shooting has not been established. No arrests had been made at the time of publication.
The incident unfolded on a Sunday morning, on a road beside a primary school, in a community now reeling from the shock of watching a man gunned down on their street in broad daylight.
A Separate Incident in Parham
The Emergency Medical Services also responded to a separate incident in the Parham area roughly an hour before the Potters shooting, in which a man was reportedly injured during an encounter with police. The circumstances surrounding that incident have not been officially disclosed.
“We’re Doing Well,” the Prime Minister said Two Weeks Ago
The Potters shooting landed two weeks after Prime Minister Gaston Browne went on the radio and told the nation that Antigua and Barbuda remains one of the safest countries in the Caribbean. He cited roughly four homicides at the mid-year mark and compared the twin-island state favourably to its OECS neighbours. “I think we have as many as four, and we’re about mid-year. So we’re doing well in the circumstances,” the Prime Minister declared.
The man lying dead on a road opposite a primary school in Potters Village is, by any reasonable accounting, a direct rebuttal of that claim.
But the homicide count — now climbing — was never the true measure of what Antigua and Barbuda’s residents have been living through. The weeks leading up to and following Browne’s assurance have produced a catalogue of violent crime that reads less like a country doing well and more like a country in crisis: two teenagers shot by hooded gunmen near a tattoo shop on South Street on June 27; a 16-year-old shot in the chest by a lone gunman who ambushed him and another teenager on Armstrong Road on July 1, leaving the boy fighting for his life; a 66-year-old man shot in the chest in Mount Joy on July 13; a 63-year-old man stabbed in the shoulder with scissors during a gold chain robbery on Armstrong Road; a 67-year-old woman reportedly raped in her own home by an intruder who forced through her chain lock and threatened to kill her; a young boy found with multiple stab wounds in a suspected kidnapping; a man shot through his vehicle window on Dickenson Bay Street by a masked assailant; an elderly man hospitalised after three men broke down his front door in Paradise View; multiple business break-ins across Fort Road, Belmont, All Saints, and elsewhere; a man beaten unconscious and robbed near the West Bus Station; and a knifepoint robbery in Lower Ottos captured on surveillance footage.
Prime Minister Browne had previously acknowledged chain-snatching incidents and pointed to government youth intervention programmes. He also told citizens to resolve their conflicts peacefully. That advice, offered from behind the security detail that accompanies a sitting head of government, is a peculiar response to the shooting of a 16-year-old who was simply walking down a road, or the rape of a 67-year-old woman in her own bed. None of those victims were in a conflict. They were going about their lives.
Operation Iron Grip: Six Weeks In, Another Body on the Ground
The Royal Police Force launched Operation Iron Grip since the first week of June with considerable fanfare. Commissioner Everton Jeffers subsequently reported early results — chain-snatching arrests, a seized firearm, and a car chase in the Spanish Town area that ended with two young suspects in custody.
