Several hours before dawn on Saturday, dancehall vet Captain Barkey (born Joslyn Hamilton) and his lover Tracy Bennett were shot to death in the parking lot of the Holiday Motel in the Bronx.
The alleged murderer, according to New York City police: Joseph Kernizan, a Haitian music promoter and Bennett's ex.
Pursued from NYC to South Florida by the U.S. Marshals, the 42-year-old suspect was eventually trapped inside a two-story apartment building, located near the corner of NW 157th Street and Second Avenue in North Miami.
The cops worried that Kernizan was about to skip the country and head for Haiti. But instead, he chose to kill himself.
Over the course of the last few years, a messy three-sided situation had apparently developed between Barkey, Bennett, and Kernizan, the father of two of her three kids.
In 2010, the dancehall deejay wrote a track, "Nah Left Joe," allegedly about this doomed romantic drama. And the promoter had been slapped with a restraining order for stalking Bennett, addding to his already loaded record of assault, forgery, criminal possession of a weapon, and robbery.
Then on October 13 at approximately 3:14 p.m., Kernizan pumped multiple rounds into Barkey before chasing Bennett behind the Bronx motel and killing her as she screamed, "Please no! Don't do it!"
"I heard [her] plead for [her] life and then heard gunshots," witness Keyshia Barrett told the New York Post. "She was begging."
While speeding away from the murder scene in a blue Honda sedan, Kernizan was seen and later identified by motel guests. The NYPD fixed on him. And the Marshals tracked him down, arriving at the suspect's North Miami hideout at about 10:14 p.m. on Tuesday night.
"We surrounded that location from all sides," Marshals Service spokesman Barry Golden tells the Miami Herald. "We pulled in one of our vehicles, we had lights and a P.A. and we asked for residents of the apartments to step outside."
Kernizan tried to escape through a back door. But he retreated after spotting cops. Several minutes passed and then an adult male (who'd been locked inside the building with the suspect) exited as gunshots rang out.
"When we went in, he was dead" Golden tells the Herald, surrounded by three handguns and a couple of loaded AK-47s.
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