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One of the biggest stories of 2014 was the murder of special constable Danny Conorquie. He was killed by a Guatemalan border bandit while he was on duty at the Caracol site.

This media house and others reported that he was the first Belizean law enforcement officer killed while on duty by a Guatemalan. But, history and tension between Belize and Guatemala is long, and it turns out Conorquie is not the first police officer to be killed by a Guatemalan.

To find the other, we had to go waaay back in history – to 1916. On the 17th of May, Corporal Oziah Flowers was killed by a Guatemalan soldier. An account reprinted in the Ex-Service's League Veteran's magazine of November 2000 shows that on May 17th, 1916, Flowers along with 14 other men were sent to investigate a shooting at the border. Based on the report Flowers got, Guatemalan soldiers had crossed the border and shot at two soldiers who were stationed there. Their mission was to ward off Guatemalan bandits who posed a threat to trade activities from Peten to Cayo and Flores to Benque. But the investigation team encountered about 20 Guatemalan invaders at the border and when Flowers ordered his men to disarm the Guatemalans, another bandit emerged from a nearby bush and shot and killed flowers. There was a bloody cross fire after that which left 8 Guatemalans dead and 3 wounded. Flowers' body was retrieved and buried in Cayo the next day. He served more than 30 years in the force and he was over 60 years old at the time of his death.