On a Friday night in the capital city of Kingstown, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a brazen public shooting left three men dead just hundreds of meters away from the island nation’s Central Police Station, shocking local communities and adding to a growing count of annual homicides. The three victims have been identified as Claude John, a resident of Redemption Sharpes, and Ottley Hall locals 35-year-old Karon “Twin” Bowens and 24-year-old Giovannie Grant.
The attack unfolded in the Chinatown district of Kingstown, a busy commercial and social corridor situated opposite Central Police Station, nestled between the Solidarity Carpark and the capital’s fish market. This stretch of the city is a common gathering spot for locals, who regularly congregate here to eat, drink, socialize, and gamble, making the public attack all the more alarming.
Preliminary reports from the scene outline a coordinated, targeted assault: two masked gunmen crept toward the group from the seaside path behind the city’s public washroom before opening fire, striking all three men fatally at the scene. Local law enforcement has not yet released an official statement on the incident, the investigation, or potential motives as of press time.
The killings push the total number of homicides recorded in St. Vincent and the Grenadines for the current year to 27. While this marks a 13-homicide drop from the 40 killings recorded in all of 2025, the year still has five months remaining, leaving open the possibility that the final count could narrow the gap between this year and last.
Criminal analysts and insiders with knowledge of local gang activity have posited that John was likely an unintended casualty of the attack, with Bowens and Grant the actual intended targets. Both men had lengthy criminal histories that had previously put them in the national news headlines.
Grant’s criminal record stretches back several years and includes multiple violent and non-violent offenses. In June 2023, he was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison for assaulting his ex-girlfriend in a public attack that unfolded shortly after police had already warned him to stay away from her. The assault began in Little Tokyo and escalated to a public punch to the woman’s face under the Courts gallery on Upper Bay Street, after Grant failed to force his way into the car where she had sought safety.
That September 2023, Grant received an additional one-year prison sentence for stealing EC$200 from a sanitation worker who had fallen asleep at the Public Health Department in Kingstown in January of that year. More recently, in May 2027, he faced a new wounding charge for allegedly cutting a 23-year-old Campden Park woman on the left hand during an incident in Kingstown; he was granted EC$2,900 bail ahead of a trial scheduled for February 8, 2027. That same March, he was charged with stealing EC$100 in cash from a 53-year-old South Rivers farmer at the Solidarity Carpark in February, pleaded not guilty, was granted EC$500 bail, and no update on the case’s court status is currently available.
Bowens, meanwhile, had a repeated history of firearms-related offenses dating back to 2009. That September, he was sentenced to three years in prison after being caught carrying a Ruger GP 100-357 Magnum revolver and six rounds of .38 special ammunition by Rapid Response Unit officers in Ottley Hall. Officers reported that Bowens threw the weapon into nearby brush when he realized he had been spotted approaching the patrol.
In May 2027, Bowens was again imprisoned for firearms-related violence: he received concurrent sentences totaling five years for possession of an unlicensed firearm, discharging the weapon, and wounding after he fired at Kemel Peters of Green Hill, accidentally striking Aaron Delpesche of Chateaubelair instead. Both Bowens and Grant also faced a joint 2022 charge of possession of 54 pounds of mutton suspected to be stolen, alongside two other co-defendants.
This triple killing marks the second multiple-homicide shooting in Kingstown so far this year. On April 10, two men — 29-year-old Enrique “Shoubu” John of Layou and 22-year-old Raheem Guy — were shot and killed in the Stony Ground neighborhood of the capital. Enrique John, one of the victims, had been out on bail for two attempted murder charges at the time of his death, just two days after a court ruled he could retain bail despite violating his curfew. He was also a co-defendant in a high-profile credit union robbery case from July 2024 that brought multiple charges against five separate suspects.