A devastating mass shooting in the Central Kingstown village of Green Hill on the night of September 25 left four people dead and four others wounded, marking the latest in a string of deadly gun violence that has rocked St. Vincent and the Grenadines in recent years.
Among the four fatalities is 22-year-old Steve King, the son of 76-year-old businessman Stephen King who was fatally shot on the patio of his own Green Hill home in May 2025. The other deceased victims have been identified by multiple independent and reliable sources as 30-year-old local villager Antonio Samuel, 26-year-old Shaqueil Peters, also a Green Hill resident, and 23-year-old Shevon Chandler from Paul’s Avenue. Police have not officially released the identities of the victims as of the initial investigation, and law enforcement has cited limited preliminary details available to share publicly.
The four injured victims, all currently reported to be in stable condition at local hospitals, include a 20-year-old Green Hill woman with a gunshot wound to her right hand, a 17-year-old male student hit in the right arm, right leg and left hand, a 28-year-old man with a wound to the right arm, and a 16-year-old mechanic who suffered gunshot injuries to the left thigh, right forearm and left hand.
Brenton Smith, acting Assistant Commissioner of Police in charge of crime-fighting operations, confirmed the deaths and injuries to local outlet SVGTV while at the crime scene just after midnight Friday. He told reporters that law enforcement first received the alert about the shooting at approximately 10:30 p.m., adding that the violence unfolded a short distance from the community’s outdoor hard court. At the time of his statement, members of the national Crime Investigation Unit were already processing the scene to collect forensic evidence, with the full investigation still in its early active stages. Smith added that a woman was among the total victims, and that limited available information was being disclosed at this early phase of the probe. Senior law enforcement official Trevor “Buju” Bailey, the acting Commissioner of Police and predecessor to the current crime-fighting lead, also responded to the scene alongside other officers.
Scene footage and on-site accounts indicate that Chandler was killed inside a vehicle, while two of the male victims died on a nearby street, and the fourth fatality was found along an adjacent dirt track. This shooting brings the total number of homicides in St. Vincent and the Grenadines for the current year to 36, following 40 killings in 2025, 54 in 2024, and a record high of 55 homicides in 2023.
This latest incident is the third mass shooting resulting in multiple fatalities in the country in recent months, and the second multiple-death shooting in the Kingstown area this year. The violence has quickly revived public memories of a string of deadly mass shootings that have plagued the island nation over the past three years.
In April of this year, the first multiple-fatality shooting in Kingstown took the lives of 29-year-old Enrique John aka Shoubu of Layou and 22-year-old Raheem Guy in the Stony Ground neighborhood. John, who had been out on bail for two pending attempted murder charges even after a curfew breach, was killed just two days after a court ruled his bail could remain in place. He was also a co-defendant in a high-profile 2024 credit union robbery case in South Rivers that saw five people hit with multiple charges. Just days after John’s killing, his mother was one of two people charged with the murder of a Layou resident rumored to be linked to John’s death.
In July 2023, the deadliest documented mass shooting in St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ recent history left five people dead in the Harbour Club area of Upper Kingstown. D’ondre Hillock, Jamall Bobb, Lamont “Dutchy” Hector, Ricky Taylor, and 14-year-old student Kashie Primus were killed when gunshots were fired from a passing vehicle around 8:30 p.m. Despite a EC$50,000 reward offered for information leading to arrests, police have never gathered enough evidence to file charges in the case. Exactly one year after that mass shooting, six people were shot and injured during a social gathering in Kingstown’s Paul Avenue community.
That same July 2023, three men were gunned down in downtown Kingstown’s Chinatown district, located across the street from the Central Police Station between the Solidarity Carpark and the capital’s fish market. The victims were Claude John of Redemption Sharpes, and 35-year-old Karon Bowens aka Twin and 24-year-old Giovannie Grant, both residents of Ottley Hall. Reports indicate two masked gunmen approached the area from the seaside behind a public washroom before opening fire, killing all three at the scene. Police have not released any official motive for the attack, but local sources with knowledge of organized criminal activity on the island suspect Claude John was not an intended target, pointing to the established criminal history of Bowens and Grant.
In May 2025, three people, including 68-year-old businesswoman Lesline Davis, and her customers Joel Browne and Demeon Cumberbatch, were killed in a mass shooting at a shop in Belmont. Police have charged two men—one reported to have a history of mental illness—with murder in connection to that attack.
Less than a month after that 2025 shooting, three more people were killed in a shooting in Paul’s Avenue that has drawn little public attention: 56-year-old pushcart operator Laurence Warren aka Bolo, a lifelong Paul’s Avenue resident; 44-year-old Don Ashton, a labourer from Ottley Hall; and Alston “Red Ants” Henry of Diamond.