By KHRISNA RUSSELL

Deputy Chief Reporter

krussell@tribunemedia.net

POLICE have not yet taken anyone into custody for the murder of Anthony Smith, 15, who was gunned down on Prison Lane earlier this week.

“We are following leads, but we don’t have anyone in custody at this time,” Chief Superintendent Solomon Cash told The Tribune on Friday.

Anthony was shot in front of a house in Greenwich Street shortly after 8pm on Tuesday by a man in a dark coloured Honda. He was taken to hospital where he later died.

Wellington Smith, the boy’s father, tearfully recalled kneeling over his son’s bullet-riddled body for almost 30 minutes before the ambulance “finally arrived’, despite their home being less than five minutes away from the Princess Margaret Hospital.

Mr Smith said he believes “Tony” was targeted because of the many fights he got into at school, stemming from a “gang war” between boys from Mason’s Addition and Kemp Road. He admitted Anthony was “not perfect”, but said “the system” set his son up to fail, when the Ministry of Education sent him to a school in a neighbourhood with rivals.

The distraught father said he knew the minute his son enrolled in C I Gibson Senior High School he would most likely die. Because of this, Mr Smith said Anthony was intentionally pulled out of school after only attending for three days since September.

Meanwhile, friends of the victim have told The Tribune they will retaliate against the murder of the teenager.

The threats came amid an ongoing gang and turf war that is affecting some junior and senior high school campuses in New Providence.

“I’ll slaughter them, see what I saying,” one boy aged 15 said yesterday as he stood outside the gates of C I Gibson Senior High School on Marathon Road.

“We (are) retaliating for our boy.

“Some riding mad a, and some riding (one) orda (gang),” another boy, 16, chimed in as he demonstrated various gang hand signs.

Another said: “That’s our boy man. That’s sad man. Yeah, man, I drop tears. I think it wasn’t called for. I mean that’s a lil’n.

“Dis ain’t going down like that,” someone else in the group of about 10 boys, shouted.

Asked whether fighting was common at their school, the boys agreed, one of them saying: “We just had two fights today.” As the victim’s friends gave this newspaper a glimpse into the violence plaguing the country’s educational system, scores of students ran toward a rock fight, which erupted several feet from a nearby tyre shop.

The Tribune canvassed students, whose identities have been withheld because they are minors, at C I Gibson and D W Davis yesterday, following Anthony Smith’s death on Tuesday night.

Anthony attended both schools before his death.