The family of Quinton Danny McKenzie, a 13-year-old student of L. W. Young Junior High School, who loved baseball, video games and hanging with his friends, is left with many questions and unimaginable grief after he was shot on a park in the Kemp Road area just before 8 p.m. on Friday and pronounced dead in hospital.

His father, Quincy McKenzie, said Quinton, who would have turned 14 on June 22, was the grandson of Leroy “Smokey 007” McKenzie, the late Bahamian entertainer.

McKenzie said he understands his son was shot in the neck and that a bullet also grazed his jaw or his mouth. Police said the boy was shot multiple times about the body.

Police reported that they were alerted via Shot Spotter of multiple gunshots in the area of Williams Lane, off Kemp Road. Quinton was transported to hospital via ambulance.

His father said when he was shot, he had money in his hands.

“That put a little twist on the story and many people thought he was gambling,” McKenzie told The Nassau Guardian yesterday.

“It was a gambling game but it wasn’t involving him. What happened is he works at Super Value and they got off early because it was a holiday and so instead of him going home, he stopped at the park and he saw his two brothers there and he was counting the money and they said all of a sudden they heard gunshots.”

McKenzie said the boys reported that everyone ran and it wasn’t until after the shots stopped that they realized that Quinton was not with them.

They went back to the scene to see where Quinton had run off to, his father said; they did not expect that he would be dead, but met him lying on the ground.

The boys ran home to tell their mother, who had heard the shots, said McKenzie, who was in Exuma where he said he only recently relocated to for work.

“I was trying to call him,” he said, “but I guess during the time I was trying to call him he was dead.”

McKenzie said Quinton’s mother called him to tell him he was shot.

“She was just screaming, ‘Oh, they shoot your child. They shoot my baby,’” he said, adding that he could not even respond.

McKenzie said he then told his co-workers that his son was taken to the hospital.

“I said to myself, ‘the ambulance doesn’t take dead people’, so I felt some type of hope,” he said, adding that he then tried to figure out when he would be able to leave Exuma.

“One of my co-workers was in a group and the photos came to the group and she showed me the pictures and said, ‘You said this boy in the hospital? This boy is dead.’ I saw the photos and I started screaming,” McKenzie said.

“I caught the flight out first thing the next morning. His mother never told me he had died. I knew he was shot. I knew it was serious, but I still had some kind of hope.”

McKenzie said when he realized his son was really gone, he understood why he had not answered his phone.

“I started wondering, why did I come Exuma,” he said. “This is a holiday. [We] probably would have been on the beach. Everything started flashing back.”

McKenzie said he has loads of videos of his son, some of which he has posted to social media.

The videos show happy times — a boy riding his bike and laughing with friends. 

“I recorded his whole life,” said McKenzie, adding that he used to tell Quinton he will cherish these videos when he gets older and fulfills his dream of making it to Major League Baseball.

He said he used to imagine that when his son’s life story was being told, the videos would be available to show him growing up.

“I didn’t know I would have been looking back at [these videos now],” McKenzie said.

He said his son was on the honor roll all through primary school but junior high was a bit difficult because he went there during the pandemic.

“He was a very active child, very sociable,” McKenzie said.

“He loved meeting friends. He loved being around friends. He loved video games. He never really played with toys. He loved technology. He was also a musician. He taught himself how to play the keyboard. He taught himself the drums.”

McKenzie added that Quinton loved sports and wanted to go to college one day.

“He was a happy child,” the father said. “He just loved having fun.”

He said his son — who had seven brothers between both his parents — had said one day he would buy his mother a house and buy one for his father as well.

McKenzie is known online as the Facebook comedian, as he posts numerous videos with his voiceover just for laughs.

While he said yesterday that he has great memories of his son, there was nothing to laugh about as he processed the tragedy his family experienced.

Police said yesterday they had a juvenile male in custody “assisting” with the investigation into the boy’s murder.

“They said 19 shots were fired and he got two, so it’s obvious the shots were all over the place,” Quinton’s father said.

A family meeting was planned yesterday to start planning the boy’s funeral, McKenzie told The Guardian.

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