By PAVEL BAILEY 

Tribune Staff Reporter 

pbailey@tribunemedia.net

A 32-year-old father was gunned down early on Friday while fetching water from a pump, becoming the country’s 50th murder victim for the year.

Relatives identified the victim as Jimmy “Yoshi” Laureville. Loved ones gathered at the scene, devastated by the killing.

The mother of his ten-year-old son, who asked not to be named, said he had visited their home just hours earlier. He had asked her for a favour, then said he was “going to walk around the corner”. Moments later, she got a call that he had been shot.

“I was asking them if he was still in the road and they said ‘yeah they

waiting on the ambulance or whatever’ and when I come here, he was already covered up, he was already gone,” she said.

She now faces the trauma of telling her son that his father is dead, her second time breaking such news to a child.

“Everything was his daddy,” she said. “You could tell him something negative about he daddy. He didn’t care. He loved his daddy. My baby never forgot when his daddy teach him how to count.”

She acknowledged Laureville’s troubled past, including a drug-related conviction and time in prison, but said he had been trying to rebuild his life. He had suffered emotionally after his release, especially after losing his mother and facing legal and immigration issues.

“He was going crazy,” she said. “That wasn’t the Jimmy I meet or the Jimmy I know.”

In recent years, she said, he found some peace: attending church, growing closer to God, and spending more time with his son.

“Like I say, he wasn’t no saint,” she said. “He been through troubles in his past but I ain’t gone lie, Jimmy didn’t deserve that.”

Police said they were called to the intersection of West Street and Patton Street shortly after midnight, where they found the victim lying dead with gunshot wounds. According to initial reports, he was drawing water when a dark-coloured vehicle pulled up and someone inside opened fire.