Did a new U.S. drone strike off Venezuela kill 2 Trinidadians? What family says
The mother of a fisherman from 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. Her son 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.”
The U.S. military has sunk at least five vessels off the coast of Venezuela over the past few weeks. The Trump administration says the vessels were carrying drugs to the U.S. from the South American country.
Burnley and other relatives of Joseph, who was from the fishing community of Las Cuevas in Trinidad, said he wasn’t a drug trafficker. Another Trinidadian man who social media accounts say was also on the vessel 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’ military strikes. ”What you killing the people children for?...It not supposed to be that way. The boy ain’t no drug trafficker.”
Joseph’s grandmother, Christine Clement, told the media outlet he had been trying to get back to Trinidad. In one previous attempt, she said, he ended up washed “on some little beach.”
“The first time he was coming up, they shoot up the boat, he ended 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 a U.S. strike on the vessels may have killed people who were not Venezuelans. Last week, Colombia 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 has brought the total number killed to 27 since President Donald Trump ordered a buildup of U.S. military forces 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. In Grenada, residents have begun to push back against a request by Washington to install radar and other military assets at its international airport, which was 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 U.S.’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 Truth Social, Trump confirmed the latest 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 associated with elicit narcoterrorist networks, and was transiting along a known [drug-trafficking] 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.”
This story was originally published October 16, 2025 at 12:16 PM.
