Justice was seen to be served this week when convicted killer Jaquii Pearman Desilva was sentenced to life imprisonment for the cold-blooded shooting of Prince Edness last year. Pearman Desilva will have lived most of his natural life by the time he becomes eligible for parole — and even then, at age 55, there is no guarantee that he will be released, to gauge from his clear lack of remorse over his actions.

How does evil settle in the domain of one so young? Remember, he was a mere 20 when he committed the crime, and to so intently seek to kill one person before minutes later aiming to claim the life of a second person, previously unknown, speaks of a core that might have been irreparably damaged. That is one for the good people at Westgate Correctional Facility to sort — and the inmate himself.

While this was a good day for the justice system, there is still work to be done. There were two people involved in the Edness murder on December 7 last year and only one has been convicted. The other person, equally as culpable as Pearman Desilva, cannot be allowed a free pass.

It is to be hoped that our law enforcers do not consider this to be a closed case. Whatever powers the Bermuda Police Service and the Department of Public Prosecutions have at their disposal to get to the bottom of this case, and other unsolved cases, should be exercised until the country has struck a fatal blow at the heart of the gang culture in Bermuda.

Mankind has striven, largely unsuccessfully, to find cures for cancer — and it is coincidentally topical that this is Breast Cancer Awareness Month — but gangs and the attraction to that seductively dangerous lifestyle? We can cure that.

Hit them where it hurts and cut off their membership at source — the schools. Education warning of the pitfalls of such activity needs to be reinforced and perhaps as early as possible because the truly bad people who prey on wayward youths see age as no barrier to induction. Let Pearman Desilva be the poster boy, his story the cause célèbre if you will, for the drive against gang life. But it is a must that the fight is sustained; no letting up.

We at The Royal Gazette have already begun to do our small part by taking away all name recognition to these thugs. During the mid to late-Noughties, when it appeared that a gang-related shooting was happening every other week, the names of assorted gangs littered the newspapers and the airwaves. That played right into their hands, providing a brand-name notoriety that inadvertently lent a sex appeal to violent criminal activity.

No more. Save for the odd, inescapable reference in a court case, we distinguish no gang from the other; east, west, north, south, they are all criminals and not worthy of having a badge of honour attached to a lifestyle that is far from honourable and which represents a false calling for the next unsuspecting youngster who feels socially repressed.

But it is not enough to mandate that our young people not mess with drugs and guns, or affiliate themselves with gang members by way of kinship or romance. Anyone with adolescent children will tell you that they are more likely to become rebellious when instructed of the things they cannot do. We need to give our youth viable alternatives so that a life of crime is viewed less favourably. Far less favourably.

The country can ill afford having more families ripped apart as we desperately attempt to fortify the social fabric. This is what happened when Pearman Desilva and his accomplice set upon Edness on that December evening in Southampton.

Edness is gone and so, too, in a different sense is Pearman Desilva, but three families have been left behind to suffer as a result of this heinous crime: that of Edness, that of Pearman Desilva and, please let us not forget, that of Minton Gilbert, the police sergeant who was forced to dodge bullets while doing his job. In Bermuda.

But there is also a fourth family, that of he who has not yet been made to pay for his crimes. As enablers, they know. And they suffer for knowing that their son, brother or boyfriend is an incident waiting to happen.

Pearman Desilva had a girlfriend whose residence he ran into to evade police. Likewise do many of the other gun-toting thugs who have appeared before the courts in recent times. Parents who want the best for their children, especially their daughters, should be outraged at such associations, aghast even.

The plea to our young women should be to spot the difference between a bona fide potential partner and someone whom you could be visiting in the near future in a prison cell — or, worse still, at a burial site. The question you need to ask yourselves, then, is: “Is it worth it?” The uncertainty, the anguish, the pain, the suffering, the fatherless child. Is it all worth it?

The danger in turning a blind eye is to repeat the cycle whereby fathers and sons, instead of sharing quality family time, are joined at the hip as longtime guests of a penal institution — in the case of Pearman Desilva, Exhibit A.

In every sad story, there are silver linings, some little positive that can be gleaned. In this one, we return to the victim impact statement of Sergeant Gilbert: “The ripple effect of this incident on my family is unwarranted.

“My wife shouldn’t have to panic when people on motorbikes with black visors drive up behind her car too close. My family shouldn’t be having recurring dreams involving guns when they are not violent people.”

The Royal Gazette has been involved in a belatedly quiet but highly visible protest against the unnecessary use of dark-tinted and mirror visors on our roads with a view to assisting the police, and the public, in being proactive rather than solely reactive with these criminals, and also to take whatever bite we can out of crime.

However much success we have had, we are grateful that Sergeant Gilbert has lived to tell his story because his words resound as strongly as any public campaign and may be the trigger that initiates change much sooner than might have been expected.