At 7:00 on Friday night, those living near the corner of Caesar Ridge
and Faber’s Road in the Yabra Area heard a loud explosion. It sounded
too thunderous to have been dynamite, and it shook the ground too soundly to
have been a gunshot. It was what all Belize City residents have come to fear
most in the past 6 months – another grenade, released this time inside
an overgrown backyard. 7NEWS was first on the scene and Jules
Vasquez reports.
Hortense Crawford, Port Loyola Resident
“The house shake and all. I said supposed the house fall down, what
would have happened to we in here.”
84 year old Hortense Crawford’s home was closest to the blast –
an upstairs abode about 40 feet away from this overgrown yard where the grenade
was detonated. The general area is here at the corner of old and new Faber’s
road in the Yabra area – near the home base of a gang known as the South 
Side Gangsters – that’s the “SSG” inscribed here on
this fence.
7NEWS went in with some of the police who were the
first responders and we found a scattered cluster of overgrown trees and bush.
Underneath that this small depression marks the point of detonation and the
perforations in these leaves and the disarray of the bushes show how the particles
ripped right through. They also ripped through this zinc fence about 15 feet
away, the highly charged shrapnel pellets piercing it in literally dozens of
places.
But the real damages were done to the homes closest to the point of detonation.
The Crawford home was the most at risk, 9 people live there, all women and children,
in fact there are 4 very young children.
Kenia Wells was sitting in this bedroom where the shrapnel tore through the
wooden exterior, and ripped through the cellotex wall inside the room. She was 
on the bed with her baby; just two feet to the left and a foot lower, and the
outcome would have been frighteningly different.
Kenia Wells who wished to appear off camera told us what the explosion was
like.
Kenia Wells, Area Resident
“I was in the room with my baby and I was getting clothes and pampers
to go clean up there when this loud bang. All I could do was go on the bed and
cover she down while the next one was in the hall with her auntie. The whole
of their faces are still burning them, it feels like pepper spray on your face.
I know my baby, she must have felt it most because we started to scream out.
All I could do was keep her on the bed and don’t move.”
In the hours after the explosion, Kenia and her grandmother Hortense Crawford
had to console their children while also trying to calm themselves.
Hortense Crawford,
“All of us were sitting in the place right so looking at television
as usual. I said to let me go and straighten the bed and as I get up, boom,
and I dropped back. I said oh my God what is that and my poor daughter is out
there. You mean we will die and she isn’t even here. That thing gone off,
the TV, and two of the lights went off so I couldn’t go nowhere, I sat
patiently and then it came back on and I tell them what happened, why are they
doing these things for. I said, ‘oh my God we are in a serious position.”
And so are the police who had no immediate answers. Commander of Police Operations
Crispin Jeffries scoured the bushes searching for evidence. At about ten he 
was joined by BDF Bomb Expert Major James Requena who was first briefed by Jeffries
and then started to look for clues in the ground and in the immediate area.
Following the dispersion pattern of the explosion he looked inside the trunk
of this coconut tree, searching for a shrapnel pellet that was embedded there.
And though he looked high and low, it was lodged too deep within the tree trunk
to find.
Next he went inside the Crawford home, prying into the couch, and checking
the floor for this key fragment that would tell him what kind of grenade it
was. He found nothing inside the Crawford home but he did finally come up with
a fragment when he checked the outer wall of an adjoining home, about fifty
feet from where the grenade exploded and that’s where he got lucky.
Major James Requena, Bomb Expert
“Offensive.”
Jules Vasquez,
That small little particle?
Major James Requena,
“Yes. The grenade is designed that way then, it is designed that way
so that when the explosion goes, it lets go at least two hundred and odd of
this and the pressure which it moves, these are what cut through things. That
is why I told you, once I find it I will know what we are dealing with.”
Shortly after they found another fragment and continued to search all over 
the yard and in another tree, plying the trunk for one more shard. And when
you see how hard he is digging, how deep he is trying to get, you appreciate
how powerful the blast was to drive the pellet deep into the tree trunk. Too
deep in this case to be recovered. A search in another home though did turn
up a few more fragments and in total five were recovered.
Major James Requena,
“All indications are it was an offensive grenade. At the present time
I cannot say what type until I find the fly-off lever or the pin. But definitely
it is an offensive grenade because we’ve recovered five shrapnel so far.
Offensive grenades are designed, that they have at least 200 or 250 broken down
parts and when the explosion goes, as you can see from the fence, it goes through
metals, trees – anything until it is lodged itself, still the velocity
finishes.
With this somebody was either using it and it slipped from them or something
because based on the direction that it hit, it is not targeted at none of the
residents because if it was, it would have hit their target. It was in the back
of a yard, not here nor there, but it affected three residences. So from my
estimation, somebody had it, was testing it, it slipped from them, and they
decided just to throw it.”
And Requena says it is no plaything. It is a deadly and indiscriminate weapon.
Major James Requena,
“This is an offensive grenade. This is designed to kill. Whoever has
these things, and I appeal again, please hand them in because you don’t
know what you’re doing. You’re not trained to use them and you will
endanger yourself and loved ones. Don’t play with these stuff, these stuff
are designed for war. These are designed to kill, nothing else.
You saw what happened to the zinc fence, it went through the zinc, went
through the coconut tree, went through a house wall, through one room, double
wall, board wall, and then in a living room. It has a kill radius of approximately
150 feet which is the size of a football field but it can travel up to 230 meters
which is 750 feet.”
Hortense Crawford was sitting about 50 feet from where it exploded.
Hortense Crawford,
“For years I’ve lived here and this hasn’t happened yet.
We’ve been hearing gunshots, we’ve been hearing people getting shot
but that didn’t affect us because that was something was happening everyday.”
Jules Vasquez,
How do you sleep here tonight Kenia?
Kenia Wells,
“I have to sleep because we don’t have nowhere else to go. All
of us are afraid, not only me one. I am afraid bad. My baby even said, ‘mommy
gun pop,’ but I told her it is not gun baby, it is not gun.”
Hortense Crawford,
“Nobody got hurt. Satan was out thinking that he had power but my
savior that is above has more power than him. I don’t feel safe, I feel
that something else might happen.”
And that is the abiding fear that all Belize City residents have to live with
in the urban terror era.
The night’s activity ended at 11:00 and the BDF and Police were
back the next morning scouring the area in search of the fly-off lever and pin
which together would determine precisely what type of grenade it was. But though
they searched for hours, they came up with nothing.
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