A woman, who survived a gun attack four months ago, was killed instantly after she was shot three times in her chest outside Tom’s Bar,Freeport, on Sunday night.
Villagers said Seema Balkaran, 33, of Arena Road, Freeport, was shot in August during a drive-by shooting outside the same bar. Another man was also injured then.
Residents who knew Balkaran, a mother of a 14-year-old boy, said they were unsure if the murder was linked to her relationship with two men, one now behind bars.
Two weeks ago another man went to Balkaran’s home and smashed the windows and windscreen of her pickup. Villagers said they have not seen that man since the incident. Eyewitnesses to Sunday’s shooting said she was standing outside the bar shortly after 8 pm when she received a phone call and walked away from the group of men to the side of the road.
A silver Honda Civic pulled up alongside her and the occupant in the front passenger seat lowered the window and shot her three times, the witness said. Balkaran managed to hold on to a wall and walked back to the area where she was liming before she collapsed and died. Her son, a Form One student at a Central secondary school, ran to the scene and held his mother in his arms but she was already dead, the witness said.
The child called his father and told him about his mother's death and left the scene. He was found wandering along the roadway by his father a short time later.
Balkaran's mother, Parbatie Balkaran, recalled her daughter was grazed by a bullet a few months ago in the same place she met her death.
She added: “Somebody shoot up in front here a few months ago but she only get graze with the bullet. I tell she stop liming here but she didn't want to listen.”
She said she last saw her daughter alive around 5 pm that evening when she came home to speak to her son. “She pass home around five to talk to her son but she leave after about five minutes and gone again. She was accustom liming here and playing cards every night with them boys,” Balkaran added.
She said her daughter, the elder of her two children, had fallen out with a friend two weeks ago and the man had come to the family’s home and broken several windows and smashed the glass in Balkaran's pickup van.
One eyewitness, who asked not to be identified out of fear for his life, said Balkaran was liming inside the bar about half-an-hour before the shooting. He said: “They were playing cards inside the bar but then they gone outside and sit down. She was talking to me before they went across there. A little while after, I hear three hard noise, like ‘Pax, pax, pax.’”
Officers of the Freeport Police Station and Senior Supt Johnny Abraham responded. Abraham said while there was video surveillance from the bar it would not be sufficient to identify the shooter.
Abraham said police had no motive for the killing.
