A movie night in their living room turned deadly for 47-year-old Andre Hinds when intruders used a crowbar to force their way into his Northumberland, St Lucy home and shot him multiple times just after 10 o’clock last night.
The two armed men then turned their guns at Hinds’ Vincentian wife Jalitha, but she pleaded with them not to shoot, telling them that she was seven months pregnant.
“She say ‘but me pregnant, me pregnant’. Then they say, ‘well you give me what you got, everything’. And she started to hand them everything and then they ran outside and the people next door came to her rescue,” the deceased’s sister Lisa Hinds told Barbados TODAY, repeating what she was told by her sister-in-law about the horror she faced.
The men made their escape with an undisclosed, yet small amount of money.
Hinds had attempted to flee from the bandits even while under fire. He managed to make it to the back of the house where he died minutes later before neighbours who had responded to Jalitha’s screams had attempted to assist Hinds. His final words to them were: “They shoot me.”
Relatives said the young wife, believed to be in her 20’s, was not handling the ordeal well and had to be hospitalized for observation after her blood pressure climbed to a startling high.
“I don’t know how people could be so wicked. You mean they got the money and they still shoot him? I really don’t know how people could be so wicked,” the sister cried as she called for the perpetrators to be caught and made to feel the full weight of the law.
Barbados TODAY understands that the couple had earlier heard “strange noises” and had gone to investigate, but saw nothing. Moments later the men ripped the door and started pushing the husband around, demanding that the couple hand over their valuables. One of the armed men is believed to have been injured during the altercation.
Placing her head on the living room table at her Greenidges, St Lucy home, Hinds’ elderly mother Marlene barely managed to get any words out.
She explained the turmoil within, having to come to grips with the fact that hours after seeing the eldest of her three children at the polyclinic, she was looking at him in a body bag.
“It got me weak and shaky. I falling down when I try to walk. He was the best, not because he was my one, because he respect me to the end. You can go in the district and ask anybody,” a sobbing Marlene said.
Hinds, the father of a daughter in her 20s, was a small farmer who raised livestock on property near his home.
His mother said she shuddered to think what could have happened to her unborn grandchild and daughter-in-law had there been no money at the house at the time.
“He does keep money there because he like to know he got money because his wife pregnant,” Marlene said.
When Barbados TODAY visited the scene around midday, residents were trying to make sense of the tragedy. Some described the deceased as a mannerly individual who never passed by without saying a quiet hello.
One resident who requested anonymity said she saw Hinds yesterday evening when he stopped to ask how she was doing while she was gardening.
“He was always quite respectful. Once I step out on my gallery and he pull up there he would say hello. Sometimes he would give a joke and go along about his business,” the resident said.
“It was so sad to see his wife walking with a torchlight to somebody house screaming ‘them kill he’. You imagine them see that man wife big pregnant and tek he away from she? What Barbados really coming to though? I just can’t understand how you could go in a man house and kill he,” she added.
First Published Barbados Today
