A killing in Rockies, and three different homicide counts for St. Vincent

Local outlets are reporting the year’s toll as both 30 and 31. The gap comes down to a single death the police have not classified.

Vincypowa News • Accountability Desk

The fatal shooting of a Rockies man this week, days after his release from prison, has been logged by one news outlet as St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ 31st homicide of 2026 and by another as the 30th. The discrepancy is not a clerical slip. It reflects a real disagreement over how to count a death that the police themselves have, so far, declined to classify.

The man was identified in local news reports as Akeem Ferdinand, also known as “Chaka Bom,” a resident of Gurley Hill, Rockies. According to those reports, he was shot at around 8:30 p.m. at the residence where he lived, and had been released from prison less than two weeks earlier. Police launched a homicide investigation, and the circumstances of the shooting remain unclear.

That much is not in dispute. The number attached to it is. One News SVG placed the killing at 31 for the year. St. Vincent Times placed it at 30. Both cannot be right, and the difference is not about Ferdinand at all. It is about a death four days earlier in Mesopotamia.

On the night of Tuesday, August 4, Michael Jackson, a 52-year-old labourer of Yambou, sustained a gunshot injury in Mesopotamia in what the Royal St. Vincent and the Grenadines Police Force described as an officer-involved shooting. Preliminary information placed the incident after 11 p.m. near the Memorial Funeral Home. Jackson was taken to the Levi Latham Health Centre, where he was pronounced dead.

The wording of the police statement matters here. The force said the Commissioner of Police had ordered a probe to establish the circumstances, and that a post-mortem examination was expected to ascertain the exact cause of death. At no point did the release describe the death as a homicide or a murder. It called it an officer-involved shooting under investigation.

That is the pivot. Count Jackson’s death as a homicide, and Ferdinand becomes the 31st. Hold it aside pending the probe and the post-mortem, and Ferdinand is the 30th. One News counted it. St. Vincent Times did not. The police have not.

There is no single official public tally that settles the matter, which is why outlets are left to reconcile the count on their own, and why they land in different places. The two most established methods point in different directions. iWitness News has, in past years, folded police killings into its annual homicide count, which would tend to include a death like Jackson’s once classified. Searchlight, by contrast, runs two parallel figures: a “homicide count” and a separate tally of people “killed violently.” That second model is built precisely so that a contested or unresolved death does not quietly inflate the headline number before the facts are in.

The stakes of that bookkeeping are not academic. St. Vincent and the Grenadines recorded 40 homicides in 2025. A country this size feels every case, and the running count has become a shorthand for how the year is going. When a police-involved death is quietly absorbed into that figure before any inquiry has ruled on it, the number stops describing what it claims to describe.

On the standard the police have themselves applied, the confirmed homicide count stands at 30 with Ferdinand’s killing. Jackson’s death is a pending officer-involved case that could raise the figure to 31, but only if the probe and post-mortem establish it as an unlawful killing. Until then, the honest number is the one that says so.

Verification note: The identity of the Rockies victim is drawn from local news reports and has not yet been confirmed by an RSVGPF release seen by this outlet. Details of the Mesopotamia officer-involved death are drawn from the RSVGPF press statement of August 5, 2026, as carried by NBC Radio SVG and other local media. This account will be updated as the police provide further information.