A shocking double murder has rattled the quiet community of Penal in south Trinidad, prompting an urgent manhunt and a major internal probe after investigators made an unexpected discovery: police-issued ammunition at the scene of a gang-style shooting. The violence unfolded shortly after 8 p.m. on Sunday, when local residents reported hearing a rapid barrage of gunfire erupt from a residential property along Rock Road.
Initial witness accounts paint a chilling picture of the attack. One man who was at the home watching football with the two victims told investigators that 23-year-old Jahrael Akeel Tafari Hunte, a local resident of Penal’s Syne Village, had stepped outside to answer a call from his wife just moments before the gunmen struck. Minutes after Hunte left the room, the witness looked outside and spotted three unidentified masked men armed with firearms loitering near the property’s front gate. Before he could raise an alarm, a hail of gunshots rang out, forcing the witness to flee the home for his own safety.
Once the gunfire stopped and the attackers had fled, the witness returned to the property to find Hunte and 45-year-old Randolph Felix, a Rock Road resident, lying unresponsive on the ground, both having sustained multiple gunshot wounds. A third man at the scene survived the attack but suffered a gunshot wound to his left lower leg, along with cuts and abrasions to his chest and wrist. He was rushed to a nearby medical facility for treatment and remains in stable care under observation as of the latest updates.
Responding officers from the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) immediately cordoned off the area and called in specialist crime scene investigators from the Region Three Homicide Bureau to process the site. Over the course of their examination, investigators recovered a large cache of ballistic evidence: 21 spent shell casings, four broken metal fragments, and three live, unfired rounds of ammunition. What made this discovery unusual, however, was that one 9mm spent casing and one 9mm live round recovered at the scene bore official TTPS markings, confirming they had been issued to police service personnel. All other ammunition recovered carried commercial manufacturing markings from third-party arms producers.
This brazen double killing is not an isolated incident in the region. The attack capped off a staggering 13-hour wave of violence that left six people dead across south Trinidad. Earlier the same morning, three men were shot dead in a separate shooting incident in Corinth, Ste Madeleine, adding to the growing tally of violent deaths in the area.
Investigators now face two parallel lines of inquiry: first, to identify and apprehend the three armed attackers responsible for the shooting, and second, to determine how police-issued ammunition ended up in the hands of the gunmen. Authorities have not yet ruled out any potential connections between serving or former police officers and the attack, and the TTPS has confirmed it will conduct a full review of all issued ammunition stockpiles as part of the ongoing probe.