A violent home invasion in Penal has left three family members physically injured and psychologically traumatized, after four armed criminals broke into their residence, held the group hostage for 90 minutes, and stole thousands of dollars in valuables before fleeing.
In a first-hand interview with local media *Express* the day after the attack, one of the surviving victims described the perpetrators as pure evil, saying she fully expected to lose her life during the prolonged ordeal.
The attack unfolded in the early hours of Monday. Before gaining entry to the property, the intruders first poisoned the family’s pet Husky, Max, who was left dead outside the home after the incident. The group then forced open a back door to get inside, where they encountered two adult sisters and their teenage nephew. The criminals immediately bound the three hostages and began a violent search for $450,000 in cash they claimed was stored on the property.
Over the course of an hour and a half, the attackers, who were armed with a loaded gun and cutlasses, remained in constant cell phone contact with an off-site accomplice as they ransacked every room, tore through cupboards and drawers, and repeatedly beat and threatened the bound hostages. Recounting the terror, one sister said the criminals pressed a gun to her sibling’s head and gave her just five seconds to reveal the location of the rumored cash. They broke a heavy picture frame over the woman’s head, then dragged the teenage nephew into the room and beat him severely with both a cutlass and a broomstick. “I honestly thought that I was going to die,” the survivor told reporters. “When you see a gun in front of you and a man saying ‘Tonight you all will die,’ that terror doesn’t leave you. These men are devils walking on the earth. If you can beat women and a child that brutally, something is very wrong with you. You need God.
Despite repeated beatings and threats, the family maintained they had no such large sum of cash on the property. Refusing to believe their claims, the intruders continued their assault and search until they were forced to accept the money was not there. Before fleeing, the group stole all of the family’s gold jewelry, an undisclosed amount of U.S. currency, and roughly $50,000 in local Trinidad and Tobago dollars. They also stole one sister’s Nissan B-15, valued at $25,000, which was parked on the property, and drove away in the stolen vehicle.
After the attackers left, the victims managed to untie themselves and raise the alarm with nearby relatives, who immediately contacted local law enforcement. Police confirmed that response teams from the Penal Police Station, the Criminal Investigations Department, the South-Western Division Task Force, and the South-Western Division High Performance Patrol Unit arrived at the scene just after 1:20 a.m. on Tuesday to launch the investigation.
Officers located the stolen Nissan abandoned on Haggard Trace in Penal not long after the attack. The vehicle was towed to the Special Evidence Recovery Unit to undergo full forensic testing for DNA and fingerprint evidence. Investigations are currently ongoing led by Police Constable Ramdhanie, with no arrests reported as of the latest update.