A High-speed Chase Between Police and Teenage Gunmen

A high-speed chase between a fleeing Dodge minivan and three police patrol vehicles responding to a shooting incident on Faber’s Road, ended with the suspects escaping on foot.  The incident happened shortly a four o’clock on Sunday evening as twenty-two-year-old Kenyon Cherrington and seventeen-year-old Kiron Williams were socializing inside a yard on Faber’s Road.  A vehicle emerged on the scene and its occupants opened fire on both young men.  Police in the vicinity responded to shots being fired and quickly gave chase.  News Five’s Isani Cayetano reports.

Isani Cayetano, Reporting

Belize City police were in hot pursuit of a minivan on Sunday evening and it was all captured on camera.  Surveillance footage from a nearby residence shows the vehicle careening down Faber’s Road Extension, before a trio of men promptly exited and took off running.  A split-second later, three police pickup trucks descended on the scene, one immediately giving chase behind the fleeing men.

ASP Fitzroy Yearwood

, Communications Director, BPD

“Two minors may have been injured in that and we have a twenty-one-year-old that showed up at the Karl Heusner [Memorial Hospital] last night with a gunshot injury that we believe may have been an occupant also of that vehicle.  Our investigators are on the ground as we speak canvassing that area.  We have gathered that this may have begun on Faber’s Road sometime earlier in the evening, sometime around four o’clock yesterday.  Police pursued a Dodge van.”

According to Assistant Superintendent Fitzroy Yearwood, police are investigating the incident.

Fitzroy Yearwood

“Occupants of that vehicle exited and opened fire on some persons in a yard and police were not too far from that area and hearing these shots, police pursued that vehicle.  The vehicle may have taken them on a little chase and, through several streets on the south side of Belize and they had three persons exited that vehicle at the corner of Central American Boulevard and Jane Usher Boulevard.  These persons exited and like I said, our officers canvassed that area immediately.  We know that a little after eight last night, this young man Williams, of a St. Joseph Street address, showed at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital with gunshot wounds and we believe that he was one of the assailants in that van that eluded the police earlier.  He’s currently under police guard and we are hoping that at the end of this investigation we would be able to levy charges.”

The shooting, police say, was carried out by a pair of minors who recklessly endangered the safety of the public in their flight from the pursuing officers.

Fitzroy Yearwood

“I have also been informed by investigators that other occupants of the vehicle who were believed to be a seventeen-year-old minor and a sixteen-year-old that are being sought by police as we speak.  These type of activities, we are not used to in our streets and that is reckless endangerment of myself and you, the law abiding citizens of this country.”

Reporting for News Five, I am Isani Cayetano.