For the second time this week, Belize City has seen a homicide at 6:00 pm, in the open street. Sometime around 6 yesterday evening a 21-year-old man was killed on Caesar Ridge Road in the Yarborough area. The man with the best view of the crime was an off duty police officer who was walking in the area when he saw a group of men fighting and that one of them had been stabbed to the chest. He rushed to his aid and handcuffed the man who he believed to be responsible. When he realized that the victim, 21-year-old Wasani Belgrave was still alive, he left the cuffed suspect and rushed him to the KHMH. But Belgrave died almost on arrival at the emergency room. Today his mother, who wished not to appear on camera, told us that she was there only to feel the last signs of life leaving her son's body. Alfonso Noble Reports.
Cecilia Lewis, Victim's Mother
"I was here and I said I was going to sleep. I said I feel like drowsy so I am going to go sleep and as I came inside I said I would sleep right in the chair there and then somebody asked for me. So I said I am coming and when I looked it was my cousin. I told her I was coming because she lives by Yabra. She told she doesn't know how to tell me what happened, she told me my son dead. I said maybe they stabbed him but he wasn't dead. She told me she would take me to the hospital so I went to the hospital. I saw my son and held him in my hand. He was dead. Right at the hospital where I met him his body was still hot and he was still bleeding."
Cecilia Lewis is mother of 21-year-old Wasani Belgrave, as she recalls the last time she saw her son she could not believe that he would have been killed - especially because of the way it happened:
Cecilia Lewis,
"He had to work yesterday morning and when he finished working after 5, he and a friend walked up Queen Charlotte Street and right there I heard that somebody whapped him down from back on meanwhile another one, because I heard more than one attacked him, meanwhile another one jucked him and the other was beating him or me noh know. He had two stabs, one to his heart and one under his chin."
But while Lewis says her son's death was a shock yesterday it is something that was not at all unexpected. And she says that living in the area in his past and working at the Port may have had a lot to do with it.
Cecilia Lewis,
"He told me those boys wanted to kill him."
Alfonso Noble,
He explained to you why?
Cecilia Lewis,
"He said when they were young, he grew up on Yabra because it is there we lived, he said that things from he was young, like 8 or 9 so they were little children, those children they live in grievance and they grow up in grievance so they still had that grievance against him because he didn't do them anything. When he is here he stays here all day and doesn't go anywhere because he actually stays home and in the night the first person to go to his bed is he. Everybody out there is hustling and a lot of days they are not doing anything but after all he used to fight to get on the truck but now he has it steady and they don't like that. The other children they don't like it out there because they actually don't make anything sometimes for the day and some of their girls have babies to mine but Wasani didn't live with a soul but me."
And while Lewis can now only speculate as to the reason for her son's death, she says there is one certainty: she will miss him dearly.
Cecilia Lewis,
"I will miss my son for a long long time. God rest them. He will take care of it all. Vengeance is for God, not for me."
While the off duty police officer managed to handcuff the suspect, when he left the area to try and help Belgrave, the suspect escaped. Police however managed to retrieve a knife from the suspect who is identified as Alex Palacio and they are looking for him. A post mortem conducted on Belgrave's body certified that he'd been killed by a single stab wound that penetrated his heart.
