15-year-old Kassman Gill Succumbs 52 Days Later

A couple hours before the Medwood shooting on Ebony Street, a promising high school student succumbed to gunshot injuries he sustained six weeks ago. Kassman Gill died at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital after five p.m.  The death of our youth continues to send shockwaves across the country and today, News Five spoke with his father Cecil Gill who had choice words for the perpetrator, as the family remembers their “special” loved one who was callously ripped from their lives.

Cecil Gill

Cecil Gill, Father of Deceased

“Here comes a spineless coward while my son is walking down the street and shoot him, unsuspectingly. He is not a street figure, he doesn’t see the danger coming. These people know who their enemies are. Yo know your enemy, go face your enemy. Go face your enemy – you know who it is.”

Duane Moody, Reporting

…the strong words from Cecil Gill to the person who murdered his son just a stone’s throw from where they lived on Logwood Street.  On the afternoon of August sixteenth, fifteen-year-old Kassman Gill was walking on Magazine Road near the Atlantic Bank building when a gunman opened fire on him before getting over him and shooting the minor in the back. On Wednesday evening, after fifty-two days in the I.C.U. at the K.H.M.H., Kassman succumbed to his injuries.

Cecil Gill

“Yesterday at 5:20, my beloved son, Kassman Odinga Gill passed away after fifty-two days of fighting to survive. He wanted to live, he had a dream, he had a vision for his life; he had his life charted out – what he wanted to do with himself.

We know the severity of his injury. We know that the possibilities of him walking again were minimal, but chances of surviving was there and we would have dealt with all the other stuff afterwards. For a minute, there was a glimmer of hope because we were able to video chat with him for four days. He was conscious and he responded with nods – yes no, yes no. And there was a mishap at the hospital and he reverted back into that coma state and there was no turning back from there. He just kept deteriorating daily.”

The family has been broken: a father, mother, their son and two daughters – five pieces of a puzzle, but now there’s a missing piece.

Cecil Gill

“It is heart-wrenching to go every day and watch your child just deteriorating in front of your eyes and you cannot help him. The nurses, doctors at the Karl Heusner did a magnificent job with the limited resources that they have. They don’t have a cat-scan machine; they don’t have a MRI machine. Had they had those things, my son’s chances of survival would have been better because when you have to move him to Medical Associates to do a cat scan, you jeopardizing his life because of the severity of the injury to the lung. Yo see. An attempt was made at doing that, but we had to rush him back in because pressure and oxygen level started to fall.”

Today, the family was looking back at photos that captured Kassman’s character – he loved the environment and was great with DIY projects. He was a student, a son, a brother and a friend.  But since the incident, no one has been charged for the crime and Cecil Gill is asking for justice.

Cecil Gill

“There hasn’t been any arrest, the idiot is still running around. According to Mister Williams, they are bringing in the FBI to enhance the video footages of the Dwayne Gabourel situation and we are requesting also that you do the same, enhance the video footages of my son’s shooting, which is of poor quality. And I think that if you would enhance it, you would see more plainly the perpetrator. So we hope to see if we could get an audience with the Commissioner of Police and make that request formal.”

Duane Moody for News Five.