“I Was the One Who Identified My Daughter’s Body”

Belize City resident Fitzroy Myvette left the door unlocked Monday night. His daughter, twenty-year-old Brianna, left home for volleyball practice, and like most nights, she’d come home after buying something to eat and settle in. He told his wife not to bother locking up. He’d wait for her himself.

He never expected the knock that came instead.

Brianna, a Belize Central Prison employee, had been sitting in a car with a friend outside a restaurant on Freetown Road when gunfire tore through the vehicle just before midnight. She didn’t survive.

Fitzroy recalls the ordinary evening that came before it. “I last saw her about after 7 going to 8, when she told us she was going to leave to volleyball practice. After that we know that she normally does her volleyball practice, then she comes home, buy her food and then comes home. So last night when she went, my wife was closing the door and I told her not to lock it because Brianna is going to come later, so I was up waiting for her to come.”

Exhaustion eventually won out. He fell asleep still waiting. What woke him wasn’t his daughter walking through the door, it was police, standing outside past 11pm. “We fell asleep, and after 11 in the night we got a bang on the door. We saw the police outside, and they asked one of us to go to the hospital. They said there was a shooting incident, and I was that person that went and identify my daughter’s body.”

Investigators are still working to determine who opened fire on the vehicle and why, as another family in Belize City is left grieving a life lost to gun violence far too soon.