So, was the shooter or shooters deliberately targeting men of Spanish descent? It's a deeply disturbing possibility - but one we must report on because it's what information to the police suggests.
Indeed, the possibility of such random barbarity almost boggles the mind and we asked violence anthropologist Dr. Herbert Gayle to decode it for us. Gayle did the comprehensive study on violence in Belize in 2010 - and today we called him in Jamaica to ask about this disturbing pattern where innocent persons are targeted - possibly based on their ethnicity.
Gayle said that globally it's not too uncommon - and he explained what he calls the "Combatant Frame."
Dr. Herbert Gayle, violence anthropologist
"It's a group of young people feel state-terrorism, they feel that the state has slaughtered them for a special oppression and had used force on them unfairly then they are likely to act upon persons who are within our country to be outside of what we called the combatant structural frame of war, in other words they would no attack another gang to prove a point because they would already assume that the state does not care about gang members. What they do is to attack a group outside of that frame and that would include anybody from the elderly, children, somebody who is of different race or any group at all that is not within the age group of 15-30 and who would be of the description of the persons who are involved in underground street war. To get that happening now is a gang becoming more intelligent and more political savvy and that they are sitting down together including enemies sometimes and work out the most effective way to jerk the state and I think that state agencies have to become a little bit more creative in the way they try to seek social order."
We held that discussion with Gayle in Jamaica this evening - and we'll air a little more from it tomorrow.
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