For decades, Bernard Mahabir, 71, and Kenneth Gill, 67, shared a close bond as friends who regularly gathered socially. What began as an ordinary day of casual meeting would end in a senseless tragedy that has left their small community reeling in shock.
Investigative details from local law enforcement outline the sequence of events that led to their deaths. On Sunday morning around 11 a.m., Gill left his residence in Cazabon Gardens, Trincity, and picked up his lifelong friend Mahabir from his home in Pasea, Tunapuna. The pair first drove to a Lopinot community center, where Gill parked his white Nissan Tiida, before Gill’s son transported them to a social gathering in La Pastora, Lopinot. By 5 p.m., the two men were dropped back at the community center, and from there they walked to a nearby neighborhood bar for an additional hour of casual time together.
Investigators now believe that this stop at the bar would ultimately seal their fates. After observing Gill making payments with his bank card during their time at the bar, attackers targeted the pair, seeing two older retirees as vulnerable, easy targets for a violent robbery. The two men were last seen alive by relatives at approximately 6 p.m., when they drove out of the Lopinot area in Gill’s car.
By 9:40 a.m. the following Monday, concerned wives of both men had filed official missing person reports at the Arouca Police Station. Law enforcement immediately launched an investigation and called in the volunteer Hunters Search and Rescue Team, led by Shamshudeen Ayube, to assist in the search. Before their remains were located, Gill’s stolen bank card was used by the attackers to make multiple unauthorized withdrawals: $3,000 was pulled from ATMs in Sangre Grande in two separate transactions, and an additional $1,500 was withdrawn from an ATM in Arima.
Roughly five and a half hours after the missing reports were filed, at 3:15 p.m. Monday, police received a tip that led them to Tapana Road, a side route off Valencia Old Road in Valencia. There, they discovered the charred remains of Gill’s Nissan Tiida, with the burnt bodies of the two friends locked inside the vehicle’s trunk. The following morning, the remains were transported to the Forensic Science Centre in Federation Park, where family members formally identified the victims.
The tight-knit community where the men lived has remembered the pair as beloved, upstanding members. One neighbor of Gill told local reporters that Gill was an exceptionally kind neighbor who had lived in the Trincity neighborhood with his family for 30 years. Relatives of Mahabir shared that the two men had grown up together on the same street in Pasea, Tunapuna, and their decades-long friendship was so close that each man’s children considered the other a surrogate uncle. Mahabir, a retired married father of two, had left his position with the Tunapuna Piarco Regional Corporation roughly a decade prior; outside of his public service, he was known as a skilled tailor and an enthusiastic beekeeper.
As of Monday night, this double murder brings the national homicide toll for the current year to 117. For comparison, the homicide count on the same date last year was 126, marking a modest year-over-year decrease in total killings despite this high-profile violent crime.
