A 15-year-old schoolboy was left to die on a street near the Manny Ramjohn Stadium in Marabella on Friday night, after being chased, beaten and stabbed in the chest. This was how the story which ran in yesterday’s Sunday Express began. It captured the once-again horrid tale of a youngster having his life snuffed out, at the hands of his own peers.

Eight of them, according to the report, set upon this schoolboy, in an incident which took place in the atmosphere of an Intercol match, a game between students of two of the country’s secondary schools.

There was a time when such rivalry among school boys would have begun and ended on the field of play, with supporters expressing their passions entirely in reference to their support for their team of choice.

It has to be noted that this gang of eight who reportedly committed this act, several of them who were said to have been in police custody yesterday, is not the same as the gangs which have been warring over drug and other turf, and which is now responsible for the largest number of deaths among young black men in the country.

That aspect of the country’s disconcerting homicide statistics has also been captured in the story in yesterday’s Sunday Express. It has established that over the last eight years 2,500 persons have been murdered in the country. Of that amount, 1,800 were young black men between 18 and 33.

At 15 years old, however, Darrion Duncan was just below this age of vulnerability. He was still in school. He was in his uniform. Those who hounded him to his death are also in school.

What this murder reveals is the extent to which violence and the urge to kill have become part of the culture of the school environment in Trinidad and Tobago.

This reality cuts deep into the attempts by the State and so many Non Governmental Organisations to intervene and influence this trend.

More worryingly, it also confirms that incidents such as this, involving juveniles in school uniform, unconcerned about the repercussions to the images of these institutions, are no longer isolated.

Anger management programmes are mounted in schools and communities all over the country. Intervention strategies are being implemented and assessments are being made about which ones appear to be working, or not working and why not.

But as yesterday’s stock-taking analysis of the figures has also revealed, there is no simple, single root cause of this cancer.

What it establishes also, is that the search for solutions has simply to be even more relentless, and must continue to be even more multi-pronged that it has been up to this point.

It calls for even more commitment by those already involved, and for the commitment of others among us who for whatever reason, have remained on the sidelines.

We must keep the faith in the face of this ongoing ugliness, and continue working towards achieving the turnaround that is necessary.