The views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not necessarily those of Breaking Belize News.
By Joe Awe: On the evening of October 8, Kaylon David was walking on Iguana Street Extension. He was 17. He was a student. A gunman came up to him and shot him twice in the head.
About three hours later, Shamar Smith, 20, was gunned down on Pelican Street by a man who came on a motorcycle. The next night, Jordy Bowen was shot on Central American Boulevard.
That’s three dead in less than 48 hours.
On October 25, a gunman fired into a yard on Arlington Drive. One of the bullets hit an 11-year-old girl.
On October 29, Belize City had three shootings before lunch. A 19-year-old was killed on Freedom Street. Another 19-year-old was shot by a basketball court on Wagner’s Lane. A 26-year-old was shot on Periwinkle Street.
We’ll say their names for a week. Then we’ll forget them, the same way we forgot the ones before.
But nobody can say we weren’t warned.
In 2010, Jamaican anthropologist Dr. Herbert Gayle and a Belizean team that included Nelma Mortis finished the first full study of violence in this country. They interviewed more than 2,000 people, mostly boys and men aged 6 to 34. In 2016 the study became a book called Like Bush Fire. The title was a warning. In a place this small and this crowded, violence doesn’t stay where it starts. It jumps from yard to yard.
Here’s some of what they found.
Belize City may be the most dangerous place in the English-speaking Caribbean to raise a child. Not Kingston. Us. Gayle said 99 percent of the children they studied had been traumatized by violence. In Jamaica the number was around half.
The reason is size. More than half of the roughly 700 murders between 2002 and 2009 happened in the Belize District, most of them squeezed into about six square miles. Gayle called it an “inescapable zone of trauma.” When the killing happens on your street, your cousin’s street, outside your school gate, a child has nowhere to put it. So he carries it. Then he grows up.
The report also said boys join gangs “because of the failings of the state and civil society.”
Read that again. It doesn’t say they join because they were born bad. It says we failed them first.
The schools failed them. In the 2019 IDB study of Belize City, 76 percent of gang-involved young people said they had dropped out of school at least once. Nine out of ten said getting a gun would be easy.
The police failed them. Gayle’s team found 60 percent of young people had seen police brutality, and the report said some officers operate like gangs. Think about what that teaches a boy about who is going to protect him.
The government failed them. For decades it let people settle land with no proper roads, drains or services, then acted surprised at what grew there.
Now it’s 2026. In the first months of this year, 57 percent of murder victims were between 18 and 29. We’ve had state of emergency after state of emergency, in 2025 and again this year. Round them up, hold them, let them out. And the shooting starts again.
So what do we do?
Start with the hard truth in Gayle’s work, and also the most hopeful part. He found that the gang war in Belize City is not well organized and “can be fractured” in the short to medium term. That means this is not fate. It’s a choice we keep making.
Keep boys in school. Gayle’s research in Jamaica found that boys who finish secondary school are four times less likely to become high-risk than boys who drop out by grade nine. Every boy who walks out of a classroom at 14 is a boy the gangs are waiting for.
Treat the trauma. A child who has seen bodies in the street needs counselling, not just a curfew. Gayle has said for years that until Belize puts money into psychological support and early intervention, nothing changes.
Fix the policing. Train officers, hold them to account, and build trust in the neighborhoods. A community that fears the police won’t talk to them.
And make policy from evidence, not politics. The report called for intervention “driven by cold sterile facts.” We have the facts. We’ve had them since 2010.
We pay for this whether we act or not. Gayle once estimated that stabbings and shootings were eating 12 to 20 percent of a single ministry’s budget. We pay at KHMH. We pay in court, in prison and at funerals. The only question is whether we pay before the bullet or after it.
Anybody from Cayo knows you can’t fight a bush fire at the flame. You cut a trace and clear the fuel so it has nothing left to burn. In Belize the fuel is boys with no school, no job, an easy gun, and a head full of things no child should have seen.
Kaylon David was about a year old when the Gayle report reached the government. Every warning in it was about boys like him.
We had his whole life to act.
(Unu please read “Like Bushfire” By Dr. Gayle.)
Touch lives. Change the world
The post Sixteen years ago, somebody told us exactly how this would go appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
The views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not necessarily those of Breaking Belize News. By Joe Awe: On the evening of October 8, Kaylon David was walking on Iguana Street Extension. He was 17. He was a student. A gunman came up to him and shot him twice in the
The post Sixteen years ago, somebody told us exactly how this would go appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
