Turning now to crime, if you're a Belize City resident, you might have seen 25-year-old Jose Guzman walking around the downtown area before. Perhaps you saw him with a white sheet wrapped around his shoulders and he told you he was a guardian angel. By all accounts, he was not violent, just a mentally ill young man with an urge to wander the streets.
But someone decided to end Guzman's life, for a reason that his family is still trying to figure out.
Guzman's body was found on Wednesday morning by a fisherman who was passing by the area behind the Port of Belize. When police arrived on the scene, they found gunshot wounds, classifying his death as a murder. At first he was a John Doe but his cousin identified him yesterday and today, Courtney Menzies spoke with her. Here is that story.
When the report of an unidentified body with gunshot wounds hit the news, the Guzman family never thought it would be one of their own. The body was found partially submerged in the sea in an area behind the Port of Belize. It wasn't until the police released a photo of the tattoo that Carmita Leslie realized the victim was her cousin, 25-year-old Jose Guzman.
Carmita Leslie, Cousin of Deceased
"I just put on Facebook and I saw the thing that said they want someone to identify John Doe but I didn't read the rest of the thing and I just saw the tattoo and yelled to my ma, ma, this is Joey! I know the tattoo because I always tease him about the tattoo. I always ask him, Joey, why did you let them put Tata Duende on your hand? I always ask him that so when I see the tattoo I tell my ma, this is Joey and we noticed we haven't seen him."
Guzman went to eat at his cousin's restaurant on East Collet Canal every day but Leslie realized that they hadn't seen him since Monday. And that was strange for Guzman, whose mental illness forced him to wander the streets of the downtown area.
Carmita Leslie, Cousin of Deceased
"Joey was just a mentally challenged person. Joey walks around Belize, everyone knows him as the guardian angel, he tells everyone he has his cape. Sometimes he has on his cape. He comes and says he's the guardian angel and he walks around Belize but he has a family and we love him."
"Due to the mental illness that he has, nobody could keep him off the street because he has his mom in Ladyville and my aunty in Roaring Creek where he would go. When he gets his injection, he would go to Roaring Creek because I think the injection makes him get back sane and realize he's on the street. So he would go and when that injection wears off, he would come again."
But this self-proclaimed guardian angel had no one to save him when his attacker pulled the trigger. And now Leslie wants to know, who would target a peaceful, mentally ill young man?
Carmita Leslie, Cousin of Deceased
"I still can't see why anybody would kill him because he didn't do anybody anything. And gunshots? That is the last thing I would expect, I would more say natural cause or something but not a gunshot. It just hurts because I just think about his last moments, if they were chasing him or had him running. But Joey have a family and they love him very much. We love him very much."
"He was not a violent person, nobody has any video or anything that Joey is fighting or Joey is breaking anything anywhere, he was not violent, he was always smiling, always had some joke to give us."
And now Leslie will miss the stories Guzman made up in his muddled mind, but is pleading with the public to come forward if they have any information about what might have happened to her cousin.
