The mother of a fisherman in Trinidad and Tobago says her 26-year-old son was among six people killed Tuesday in the Trump administration’s fifth drone stroke on boats off the coast of Venezuela.
Lenore Burnley told the Miami Herald that her son Chad “Charpo” Joseph was hitching a ride back to Trinidad from Venezuela when he was killed. She said she learned about his death after “somebody called us.”
“He was on his way back,” she said. He had been in the South America nation for the past three months, she said, where “he had friends and we have some relatives over there.”
Burnley and other relatives of Joseph, who was from the fishing community of Las Cuveas in Trinidad, said he wasn’t a trafficker. The other man has been identified only as Samaroo.
“Wickedness,” Cornell Clement, Joseph’s grandfather, told Port-of-Spain based CNC3 television station in reference to the United States’ method. ”What you killing the people children for?...It not supposed to be that way.”
“The boy ain’t no drug trafficker,” he added.
Joseph’s grandmother, Christine Clement, told the media outlet he had been trying to get back to Trinidad. In one attempt, she said, he ended up washed “on some little beach.”
“The first time he was coming up, they shoot up the boat, he end up surviving. Some people take care of him. Two days ago, I ask his mother when he coming and she say something happen to the boat and he couldn’t come back again and had to turn back.”
There has been no official comment from the Trinidadian government. The U.S. government also has not identified who was on board.
This is not the first time there have been claims that the strike may have killed non-Venezuelans. Last week, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro took to the social media platform X to say there were “signs” that Colombian citizens were killed in a U.S. military attack targeting a small boat off the coast of Venezuela.
“A new front in the war has opened: the Caribbean,” Petro wrote. “Signs show that the last bombed boat was Colombian with Colombian citizens aboard.”
He did not provide additional details. “I hope their families come forward and report it,” he said.
Tuesday’s strike in the southern Caribbean Sea has brought the total number killed to 27 since President Trump ordered a buildup of U.S. military in the region, allegedly to target Venezuelan drug cartels.
Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar is one of the few Caribbean leaders to openly applaud the U.S.’s warship deployment, going as far as saying her nation will help the Trump administration if asked. She also, in another statement, said that the U.S. should “kill them all violently,” referring to traffickers.
The latest incident risks fanning tensions both in Trinidad and in elsewhere in the Caribbean, where opposition leaders have started to speak out about their concerns. In Grenada, residents, for example, have begun to push back against a request by Washington to install radar and other military assets at its international airport, which was coincidentally built by Cuba.
In an address, Peter David, an independent member of the Grenada parliament and a former foreign minister, said it would “be both problematic and undesirable for Grenada to accede to the US’s request to have its military assets stationed in Grenada in the current context. If we do, it will only help exacerbate the current tension.”
In a post on his Truth Social, President Donald Trump confirmed the strike, saying under his authority as commander-in-chief, “the secretary of war ordered a lethal kinetic strike on vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking” just off the coast of Venezuela.
“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics, was associate with elicit narcoterrorist networks, and was transiting along a known DTO route,” the president wrote. “The strike was conducted in International Waters, and six male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike. No U.S. Forces were harmed.”
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