ON the night of Tuesday, June 24, yet another senior citizen of this country who had closed from work and safely driven a distance to his Tema Community 11 home was shot dead at close range on his compound.
The 69-year-old victim, Mr Solomon Lamptey-George, who was still behind the steering wheel of his car, was shot in the forehead in front of his wife by one of three attackers who picked nothing from the car or the house after delivering the killer shot.
Mr Lamptey-George’s murder comes almost a year after the gruesome murder of 54-year-old Mr Rokko Frimpong, then Deputy Managing Director of the Ghana Commercial Bank (GCB), who was shot at his Community 18 residence after close of work while he was ironing his clothes for the next day’s work.
Not quite a month after Mr Frimpong’s murder, a 61-year-old retired public servant, Mr Kwatey Quartey, was shot in the chest at his gate, also in Tema, when he came out early in the morning to meet someone who had requested to see him. His murderer was one of five men who had pulled up in a taxi.
In society’s anguish and anger following those dastardly acts, many possible reasons were adduced for each murder, among which was the belief that some faceless persons who had some scores to settle with the victims had hired the killers to murder them.
Neither the police nor crime experts in the country believed the shootings had been carried out by contract killers and to date the families of the victims and society at large are impatiently waiting for the police to tell the nation who really committed those murders and why.
However, a few things are common to the three murders. In all three cases, the assailants either drove to or laid ambush at the gates of their targets; the attacks took place in the presence of other people and also at periods of the day when the respective community members were going about their normal activities.
The questions to ask are: Have criminals in our country become so emboldened because the great Ghanaian community value of being one another’s keeper no longer holds sway?
Is it not the case that as a people we fail or refuse to notice unusual happenings around us or fail to exercise some degree of caution when interacting with strangers who approach us and whose demeanour immediately creates some absurdity about them? Do we ever become curious about the presence of a car or some people in our areas?
The police thrive on information to conduct investigations and good leads from eyewitnesses and community members greatly help in their investigations.
While it is obvious that our blind copying of the Western culture is fast eroding the Ghanaian communal way of life, it is also true that we are missing out on one value of that culture, which is to deal cautiously with strangers and be suspicious of unusual happenings in our communities.
The police can ably fight emerging sophisticated crimes in the society if we help by being observant, promptly provide information and care a little about our own safety and those of our neighbours.
The crime wave is getting out of hand and we should all help the police in every way we can to arrest the situation.
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