By Glenroy Sinclair and Claude Mills, Staff Reporters
Inspector Courtney Medley of the St. Andrew North Division pleads with angry residents of the Rocky Valley community, in Stony Hill, after they mounted a demonstration in Stony Hill square following the slaying yesterday of a male resident in an alleged shoot-out with the police. - Norman Grindley /Staff Photographer
THE COMMUNITIES of Brandon Hill, Golden Spring, Temple Hall and parts of Stony Hill in west rural St. Andrew were agitated yesterday after the police shot dead Fitzroy Witter in Rocky Valley during an alleged shootout.
And all work on the $100-million resurfacing of the roadway from Tom's River to Stony Hill was halted yesterday.
At least four persons were detained and a magazine for a 9-mm pistol seized during a police operation in the Brandon Hill area yesterday.
Commuters in Brandon Hill and Stony Hill were left stranded as fearful taxi drivers operating between the communities withdrew their services because of alleged threats made against their lives.
Since Tuesday night heavily-armed policemen from the Special Anti-Crime Task Force have been assisting the St. Andrew North police by patrolling the areas, preventing any further violence.
TEACHERS APPEAR NERVOUS
Teachers at the Brandon Hill Primary and Junior High School appeared nervous when talking to a reporter about the upsurge in violence.
"The children are scared; some of the children say that they want to move out because they don't know what might happen next," a teacher said.
Acting Deputy Supt. Meveral Smith, Crime Officer for St. Andrew, said the police were moving between the communities on intelligence-driven operations while members of the Organised Crime Investigative Division (OCID), were seeking a former inner-city don, who was deported from the United States about four years ago.
But the general unrest continued as residents of Rocky Valley which is less than 200 metres from the Stony Hill Police Station led a heated demonstration in Stony Hill square to protest a controversial police shooting.
The residents maintain that Fitzroy Witter, a skilled tiler, was murdered.
"The police ketch the man alive, him neva have no gun. Dem fire a whole heap a shot in the air, him run, dem run him down, grab him, kick weh him foot and shoot him. Gunman kill we friend, then the police come kill one more from the lane ...How we one so bad-lucked?", one female resident of Rocky Valley asked.
Two of the men killed in Tuesday's triple murder in Temple Hall had close ties to the Rocky Valley community.
Bill Fuller, the elder brother of preacher Howard Fuller who lived in Golden Spring, questions his brother's slaying.
WRONG PLACE AT
THE WRONG TIME
"He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I will miss my brother but what can I do? He was a political activist, and that's why he was in the company of those men, and now he's dead," Mr. Fuller, a retired public servant, said.
The father of four, Howard Fuller was the preacher of a Church of God denomination in the Lawrence Tavern area, and was married to a teacher. The other men killed were Glassford Collins, nicknamed 'Ex', who operated a bar in Stony Hill, and Carlton Crawford, also called 'Pound'.
