No suspects in latest killing

“Everybody crying. Mommy, my daddy dead?” were the words uttered by Jah’sean Joseph as he climbed onto the lap of his weeping mother, Shenia Lake.
Joseph’s father, Sean “Boogey Man” Joseph, who would have celebrated his 28th birthday on December 9th, was shot dead in Pigotts village on Sunday night.
The toddler gently touched his mother’s face attempting to wipe her tears when OBSERVER media visited the Bendals home that the father of three shared with Lake and his older brother.
Lake, who is expected to deliver the couple’s third child in a few days struggled to speak through tears.
“I don’t know what I am going to do. I don’t even know what he was doing up Pigotts, because I spoke to him after 4 p.m. [on Sunday] and he told me he was taking his sister to her house in Jennings. He was driving a rental,” she recounted.
The distraught young woman said she learned about Joseph’s death via social media, and although his name was not published at that time, she became nervous based on the description of what the shooting victim was wearing.
“I called his sister because I knew that he was wearing a white vest and long jeans. That’s how he was dressed when he left the house,” Lake said solemnly. “[Yesterday] police called and said, ‘accept our condolences’ and asked for his phone number and licence plate.”
The Bendals man was last employed as a security guard at a nightclub. Lake said that when her live-in companion of eight years did not return home to prepare for work, she began calling his mobile phone, which repeatedly went to voicemail.
When OBSERVER media met with Lake, she was in the company of her mother and four siblings while Joseph’s young sons – De’sean who will turn five years old on Friday, and Jah’sean Joseph, 3, played frivolously in the living room, oblivious to the fact that their father would not be coming home.
Lake said that she spoke to the children, but knew that they are not at the age where they can fully understand.
Her two sisters and her mother reminisced about the last time they spoke with Joseph. Lake’s mother said that
Joseph was close to the family and even lived with them at the One Love Tribe.
“Me sister pregnant. Why this had to happen to him,” Lake’s sister, Recia Lake, said as she wept uncontrollably.
The deceased also had an older girl, nine-year-old Seanna Joseph.
Up to press time, Inspector Frankie Thomas, police public relations officer said that they had no suspects in custody, even though several possible witnesses have been interviewed.
He urged, specifically, residents in the Pigotts community, who may have observed any suspicious activity to contact the Criminal Investigation Department at 462-3913 or 14.
This killing brings the number of homicides for 2017 to 19.
There is a possibility that there could be a confirmed 20th homicide pending the results of an autopsy on the burnt remains of a man found in a scorched vehicle in August.