A one-year-old is now the county's latest shooting victim and the incident has left more than the family traumatised.
According to relatives, around 9.50 pm on Monday, 20-month-old Jose Nunez was outside the family's Lootoo Street, El Socorro, apartment playing with two other children, ages nine and three respectively. His mother, Enyerwi Nunez, 26, told investigators she was in the kitchen when she heard several loud explosions.
Upon investigation, she said she noticed her son lying in a pool of blood.
Nunez was taken to the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex for treatment. He is currently stable.
After examination, doctors noted there appeared to be one entry hole through the left thigh exiting the left buttocks near the anus and one entering the right buttocks near the anus and exiting through the right thigh.
CID investigators later received reports that around the time of the incident, an unknown man clad in dark clothing entered Lootoo Street through a track from Boundary Road, El Socorro, pointed an object in the air, fired a number of shots and ran back through the track to escape.
Four spent shells were discovered at the scene.
[caption id="attachment_1036045" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Luis Enrique Hernandez shows the pants his son Jose Nunez was wearing when he was shot in his legs and buttocks at their Lootoo Street, El Socorro, home on Monday night. - Ayanna Kinsale[/caption]
Evidence of the incident could be found from as far away as the entrance to the roughly 30-foot alley leading up to the apartment. There was a hole in one of the posts with about a two-and-a-half-inch diameter of concrete missing.
At the apartment, water could be seen leaking from a slow stream at the bottom of one of the water tanks near where the incident occurred. According to the child's father, Luis Enrique Hernandez, 21, that's where the bullet came to rest after it exited his son.
Holding the blood-soaked shorts his son was wearing at the time, now punctuated with bullet holes, he told Newsday the family was shaken and angry over the incident.
Speaking through a translator, Hernandez's mother told Newsday she did not believe the family was the intended target of any attack and Nunez was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She was worried about how the family could afford to take care of the toddler when he was discharged from the hospital, with her husband the only employed person in the family.
[caption id="attachment_1036046" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Luis Enrique Hernandez points to the bullet hole in a water tank at his home on Tuesday after his 20-month-old son Jose Nunez was shot on Monday night. - Ayanna Kinsale[/caption]
In December, 18-month-old, Nova Bereton, and her mother were gunned down and killed in what was believed to be a hit that was believed to be for her father.
One month later, in January, Kylie Maloney of Foster Road, Sangre Grande died at hospital after she was shot during a home invasion. While the police's website does not show a breakdown by
