A?ST?MICHAEL?WOMAN whose son was shot in Bridgetown on Christmas Eve says he was not involved in any dispute and was just an innocent bystander.
“My son is innocent,” said Hazel Watson. “He was not involved in any dispute.
He is just an innocent child who went shopping on his birthday and get shoot.”
She is the mother of 19-year-old Andrew Watson, of Wildey, St Michael, one of two men shot during a melee in Roebuck Street, Bridgetown, on Christmas Eve around 4:15 p.m.
While at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) yesterday where her son is a patient, Watson said rumours were circulating of Andrew being involved in the dispute.
She declared that she “wants these rumours which could destroy my son’s reputation to stop because they are not true”.
“It is really painful and hurtful as a mother to be hearing these things and I have to get a lawyer. He left home just to go down there and do some last minute shopping with the fellas just looking around and I just get a call telling me that he got shot. I was more surprised than ever.
“It is not like he went looking for trouble like people rating it. People saying, ‘Oh, the police shoot him down because he went to rob somebody’. If something had to go wrong with him and I had to come to the public to get help, people wouldn’t want to help.”
Hazel said she was unable to report on the condition of her son until “the doctors speak to him and let him know what is going on, because he doesn’t know as yet”.
She said that she was “not trying to convince anybody that my son is a saint, but he should not be blamed for something he did not do”.
“I am not a security guard and I cannot watch over him; I have to go to work. He has to know what he wants for his life. I would speak to him and tell him what is, from what isn’t. He has to make his choices in life.”
Andrew echoed his mother’s version of the incident.
“I just walk in the store and walk up [to] the counter. I just see men start fighting. And then I feel a burning in my skin and I realize I get shoot. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. It was my birthday and I went shopping.”