Linstead Shack Emptied By Death
April 3, 2022Lionel Shaw, better known as Shots, in the eyes of some people, was the posterboy of struggle in Linstead, St Catherine. To Swayne Sullivan, he was the father figure that he otherwise didn’t have.
Shaw, 73, died Saturday afternoon, March 26, at Spanish Town Hospital in St Catherine, his close friend and confidant Nathale Hutchinson told The Beacon.
He is originally from Victoria district in Linstead, but lived for years in a shack near the bridge along Vanity Fair Main Road.
Hutchinson explained that Shaw was taken to Linstead Public Hospital on March 24 when her daughter found him apparently passed out on the ground inside his shack.
“The ambulance come; dem put on oxygen on him and so on. When dem carry him to Linstead hospital, dem seh him get a minor stroke,” Huthinson recalled.
She added that Shaw eventually was transferred to Spanish Town Hospital where he drew his last breath.
He was a diabetic, Hutchinson said. Shaw, however, was not in agreement with that diagnosis. His left leg was amputated in recent years. And he was to undergo surgery to amputate the other, but he declined to do so, Hutchinson revealed.
She said Shaw worked for years at a telephone company in Linstead before he started a bicycle repair business in the shack he ended up calling home.
Shaw had no children, but helped to raise one of Hutchinson’s sons, Swayne Sullivan.
“Him good to me; he was like a father; I didn’t have any problem with him. Anything I ask him for, mi get it,” said Sullivan, who added that Shaw raised him from he was about three years old until he turned 16.
Hutchinson told The Beacon that the late Shaw, despite being poverty-stricken, was loving and kind to her and all her children. “He was a nice person to everybody,” she said.
Hutchinson added that Shaw’s mother died in childbirth. He was her youngest child. All but one of his siblings have died.
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