Deadly American Export: Guns
Illegal firearms are traced to thousands of killings in Jamaica, Latin America and beyond.
CLARENDON, Jamaica — She came to Jamaica from the United States about four years ago, sneaking in illegally, stowed away to avoid detection. Within a few short years, she became one of the nation’s most-wanted assassins.
She preyed on the parish of Clarendon, carrying out nine confirmed kills, including a double homicide outside a bar, the killing of a father at a wake and the murder of a single mother of three. Her violence was indiscriminate: She shot and nearly killed a 14-yearold girl getting ready for church.
With few clues to identify her, the police named her Briana. They knew only her country of origin, the United States, where she had been virtually untraceable since 1991. She was a phantom, the eighth-most-wanted killer on an island with no shortage of murder, suffering one of the highest homicide rates in the world. And she was only one of thousands.
Briana, serial number 245PN70462, was a 9-millimeter Browning handgun.
An outbreak of violence is afflicting Jamaica, born of small-time gangs, warring criminals and neighborhood feuds that go back generations — hand-me-down hatred fueled by pride. This year, the government called a state of emergency to stop the bloodshed, sending the military into the streets.
Guns like Briana reside at the epicenter of the crisis. Worldwide, 32 percent of homicides are committed with firearms, according to the Igarapé Institute, a research group. In Jamaica, the figure is higher than 80 percent. And most of those guns come from the United States, amassed by exploiting loose American gun laws that facilitate the carnage.
While the gun control debate has flared in the United States for decades, American firearms are pouring into Mexico and others countries in the Caribbean and Central America and are igniting record violence, in part because of restrictions that make it sometimes nearly impossible to track the weapons and interrupt smuggling networks.
In the United States, the dispute over guns focuses on the policies, consequences and
constitutional rights of citizens, often framed by the assertion “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” — that the reckless acts of a few should not dictate access for all.
But here in Jamaica, there is no such debate. Law enforcement officials, politicians and even gangsters on the street agree: It’s the abundance of guns, typically from the United States, that makes the country so deadly. And while the argument over gun control plays on in the United States, Jamaicans say they are dying because of it, at a rate that is nine times the global average.
“Many people in the U.S. see gun control as a purely domestic issue,” said Anthony Clayton, the lead author of Jamaica’s 2014 National Security Policy. But America’s “long-suffering neighbors, whose citizens are being murdered by U.S. weapons, have a very different perspective.”
Firearms play such a central role in Jamaican murders that the authorities keep a list of the nation’s 30 deadliest guns, based on ballistic matches. To track them, they are given names, like Ghost or Ambrogio.
Some, like Briana, are so poorly documented that the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has nothing more than a piece of paper with the name and details of the original buyer, according to confidential documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Purchased in 1991 by a farmer in Greenville, North Carolina, the Browning vanished from the public record for nearly 24 years — until it suddenly started wreaking havoc in Jamaica. For three years, its ballistic fingerprint connected it to shootings, mystifying law enforcement. Finally, after a firefight with the police, it was recovered last year and its bloody run came to an end.
The authorities traced the serial number back to the gun’s original owner. But that did not explain how it wound up in Jamaica decades later. Or how the authorities could prevent the next Briana from arriving.
The mystery is no accident. By law, licensed gun merchants in the United States are not required to do much more than record retail sales, and usually do not have to report them. After that, if a gun is stolen, lost or handed to someone else, paperwork is only sometimes required. Only a few American states mandate the registration of some or all firearms. Several prohibit it. And there is no national, comprehensive registry of gun ownership. The federal government is forbidden to create one.
Briana Comes to Town
Drawing on court documents, case files, dozens of interviews and confidential data from law enforcement officials in both countries, The Times traced a single gun — Briana — to nine different homicides in Clarendon, a largely rural area of Jamaica where violence has spiked recently.
It is just one of the hundreds of thousands of guns that leak out of the United States and overwhelm countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 100,000 people are killed every year across the region — most by firearms.
American weapons are routinely funneled into the country aboard ships, flooding cities like Kingston, the capital, where high-grade assault rifles are wielded by warring gangs.
Jamaica’s own gun laws are relatively strict, with fewer than 45,000 legal firearms in a country of almost three million. But it is awash in illegal weapons. The Jamaican authorities, who estimate that 200 guns are smuggled in from the United States every month, routinely ask American officials to examine some of the weapons they seize in raids, during traffic stops or at the ports. Of the nearly 1,500 weapons the A.T.F. checked from 2016 through 2018, 71 percent came from the United States.
The figures are similar in Mexico, which has been lobbying the United States for more than a decade to stop the guns flowing south. By some estimates, more than 200,000 guns are trafficked into Mexico each year, many to feed the vast criminal networks fighting over the multibillion-dollar drug trade to the United States.
But here in Jamaica, the killings are rarely driven by such enormous profits. The drug trade has fallen from its heyday, organized crime has been fractured and most kingpins have been killed or imprisoned.
Instead, the guns in Jamaica are often used in petty feuds, neighborhood disagreements and turf wars that go back decades, to when political parties authored the majority of the country’s violence.
Because guns are so plentiful, small insults and old vendettas that might otherwise leave few casualties grow much more dangerous.
“A lot of violence is the result of people settling their disputes, and with all the guns in the country, it is easy to settle things that way,” said Orlando Patterson, a Jamaican-born sociology professor at Harvard University.
Even some gang members agree they are often fighting over small stakes, and sometimes no financial stakes at all. “I mean, with or without the guns, we will still fight,” said one gang leader. “But the guns make it deadlier. There would be a big difference without as many guns.”
Into Thin Air
Johnnie Ray Dunn walked into a North Carolina gun store in the fall of 1991 and purchased an American icon: a 9-millimeter Browning.
Mr. Dunn, a farmer, went home with a gun that, if maintained, would last a lifetime.
That is where Briana’s paper trail began — and ended.
President Ronald Reagan had signed a bill that prohibited the creation of any sweeping national gun registry five years earlier, a pivotal piece of legislation in the history of American gun law.
The National Rifle Association lobbied heavily for the bill, which many saw as a way of expanding gun sales by ensuring easy access to firearms.
The law effectively ruled out a federal system of tracking all firearms. So when Mr. Dunn’s gun suddenly showed up in Jamaica, linked to a series of homicides from 2015 through early 2018, no one could figure out how it got there.
The Tool of a Gangster
All they know is that, more than 20 years after being sold in North Carolina, the handgun became one of the most lethal in Jamaica, the tool of a one-eyed gangster named Hawk Eye. Samuda Daley got the nickname as a boy. After an unsuccessful surgery left one of his eyes covered in a milky film, his alias was born.
Mr. Daley was a product of violence, shaped by its near constant presence in his life.
By ninth grade, he had dropped out of school to start working at a sugar factory. He joined the Gaza gang, a clique of young men who had grown up together in a knotted cluster of streets in Clarendon.
They began by hanging out, not fighting, his family said. But in the crucible of poverty and desperation, where small conflicts can turn deadly, they ran afoul of a similar group, the King Street gang. The rivalry grew quickly.
On September 19, 2015, almost exactly 24 years after Mr. Dunn purchased the gun, the first sign that it had made its way to Jamaica appeared: A man named Okeeve Martin was killed with an unknown 9-millimeter Browning.
The motive seemed to be revenge — the girlfriend of the Gaza gang’s leader had been shot by mistake in an earlier episode. She survived, but the rumor mill led to Mr. Martin, and retribution came swiftly.
The gun lay dormant for a year before claiming the life of a 17-year-old, Shane Sewell, on September 6, 2016. He was walking home, having left a bar after a night with friends. He ended up in a ditch, riddled with bullets, some from the mysterious Browning.
Officials believe he was killed in a dispute over a different firearm. In Jamaica, guns are often rented out by their owners. The borrower, looking to commit a robbery or kill someone, pays a fee to use the weapon. Afterward, the gun is returned. Given a gun’s income potential, when one is lost, the consequences can be deadly.
In the summer of 2017, the Browning struck again. Kurt Mitchell, a fisherman believed to be a member of the King Street gang, was gunned down at a party — a reprisal for an earlier homicide against the Gaza gang, authorities believe.
A Transition to Crime
Much of the fighting today stems from conflicts that stretch back before the shooters were born. In past decades, armed groups loyal to one of the two major parties battled one another for dominance. The patronage networks eventually transitioned to crime, stripped of their political focus.
Local leaders, known as Dons, grew incredibly powerful, as deep connections to the United States, Canada and Britain enabled their criminal enterprises to become transnational. But that changed as the government cracked down on the drug trade in Jamaica. By 2010, the Dons were all but a thing of the past.
Damian Hutchinson, the executive director of the Peace Management Initiative, which works to stop violence in Jamaica, said, “The political enforcers were now undermined by younger, less conscientious individuals with less purpose to the violence.”
The splintered factions began fighting one another, leading to more, and more random, violence. Wars broke out between once-aligned blocks and the gangs multiplied, to more than 250 nationwide today.
Those armed factions, fighting a small-scale war, have lifted homicides to new peaks. The 9-millimeter Browning became a terrifying facet of this landscape.