66-year-old American retiree Rodney Rushing was murdered in his own yard on Consejo road in Corozal last night. He was shot 9 times to the head, upper back, abdomen, right leg, and right thumb.
It happened at around 8:00 in the heart of a quiet expatriate retiree community and the first to respond was a police corporal who lives nearby and had just gotten home. He saw Rushing's two alleged assailants run off. He fired at them, but the disappeared into the night.
Notable is that there was no forced entry to the home and Rushing appears not to have been robbed.
A group of Rushing's neighbors discovered his body lying beside his opened SUV. This afternoon we heard from one of them who chose to appear off camera.
Reporter
"Sir, I wanted to start by asking you about your recollections. At least what you heard this morning in your neighborhood."
Neighbor
"Well, this morning only we heard, and we were the closest one that heard everything because I was up at around 7:30-8 o'clock last night when we heard the gunshots. It was 9 shots fired and we came out, when we came out we took a look and saw him on the ground on the street side inside because his fence was open and his driver's door was open so we saw him on the ground. We tried to call, and the police arrived about half an hour after and they started to look at him. Apart from that, we don't know him, he doesn't talk to anyone in the area and he hasn't lived in the area long, about 1-2 months he lived there. Our neighbor used to live at that house, they went to the U.S. and he started to rent the house, but apart from that we don't know anything else about that man and that house. This is the first time we heard something like that. We usually hear gun shots but from a distance where the hunt men they hunt, but apart from that you don't hear it close like this. This is the first time and it's really shocking to us because my baby who's only 5 years old, he was in a shock last night, couldn't sleep and cried. My sister and mom are frightened now because they don't know how - and we are an open house, we leave our house open and the police are always passing; they never stop, every minute they are up and down so."
Reporter
"Now, this gentleman is 66 years old and an American expat. Do you feel that he would have been targeted for a robbery and that perhaps this is just a robbery gone wrong?"
Neighbor
"Well I guess so, I guess maybe because - well a lot of us live in this house and we usually sit down at night outside. We've never heard anything like this in our entire lives. I've lived here 27 years and I've never heard of something like this in this area. He's a first timer around here and we don't know what he's into and what he's not into so I can't say what's going on on that side."
Reporter
"Did he have multiple visitors?"
Neighbor
"Not really, it's just himself and his friend that comes now and again to see him but he has dogs and the dog is aggressive to people they don't know so I think that's the reason he doesn't have visitors. The dog stays inside the house, not in the yard."
We last reported on the murder of an American retiree in the Consejo area back in February of 2019.
