Mickel Thomas’s family expected to spend Father’s Day at a community event the young father had been planning for weeks.

Instead, they spent the day trying to come to terms with Thomas’s violent murder during an early morning robbery on June 15.

Around 1.45 am on Saturday, Thomas, 28, of Laventille Road, San Juan, had just met his sister at a nightclub near Second Street, San Juan, to give her some money when he was accosted by a bandit.

The bandit tried to snatch Thomas’s gold chain, but he refused to give it up.

The two began to fight and the bandit took out a gun and shot Thomas twice in his stomach before grabbing the chain and running off.

People nearby heard the gunshots and raised an alarm.

One of Thomas’s friends went to the scene and found him still alive, lying on the sidewalk.

He stopped a passing car and asked the driver to take him and Thomas to the hospital.

Thomas arrived at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex shortly after 2 am.

The sister he dropped money for was told about the shooting and went to the hospital but before she could arrive, he died.

Thomas, a labourer at the San Juan Laventille Regional Corporation, was the father of a three-year-old boy.

He had planned a large Father’s Day lime in the community and later on Saturday, he was supposed to confirm some last-minute arrangements for the event. This would have been the third time he hosted the event, which he started the year his son Mikonnen was born.

When Newsday visited Thomas’s home on Laventille Road, San Juan on Sunday, the street was quiet as the event had been cancelled.

His girlfriend Elisha Daniel said she had not yet told their son what happened.

She screamed out in anger as tears streamed down her face.

“What they kill him for? A chain? That is what they kill him for? What I going and tell my child? My child is just three and I have to tell him his father dead for a chain!

“Just this morning, my son pick up my phone and watch my status and saying, ‘Daddy.’ What am I supposed to tell him?”

Daniel said Thomas began working when he was in secondary school and the chain his killer stole was the first piece of jewellery he ever bought.

“I know him forever with that chain. Since we together, back in school days, he bought that.

“He will go to school during the week and Saturdays and Sundays, he will go and do construction. That is how he buy that chain.”

His sister Sherene Thomas said the Father’s Day event had become a staple in the close-knit community thanks to Thomas.

[caption id="attachment_1090380" align="alignnone" width="1024"] From right, Elisha Daniel, girlfriend of murdered victim Mickel Thomas, kisses her son Mikonnen Thomas at their home in San Juan as Mikel's mother Nadlyn Thomas looks on. Thomas was murdered in San Juan on Saturday. - AYANNA KINSALE[/caption]

“He will throw a lime for the children every Father’s Day. It was always about the children for him, never the adults. That is the kind of man my brother was. He was always looking out for people and for childr