British Personal Trainer Gunned Down In Allegedly Targeted Killing In Jamaica

A personal trainer from London vacationing in Jamaica was fatally shot at an Airbnb penthouse earlier this week in what police are calling a targeted killing.

Sean Patterson, 33, was allegedly gunned down on Monday by an assailant wearing a hoodie as he sat poolside around noon with a friend at the One Love Guest House in the resort city of Montego Bay, per a Times of London report. Authorities found Patterson lying in a “pool of blood” at the Jamaican villa after being shot in the head and chest. He was later pronounced dead at Cornwall Regional Hospital.

Jamaican Deputy Police Commissioner Fitz Bailey, citing Patterson’s “extensive criminal record” involving guns and drugs, described his slaying as a contract killing in a statement to the press on Wednesday. 

A 34-year-old suspect, the alleged hitman, was reportedly arrested by Jamaican authorities in connection with the deadly shooting, according to The Guardian. 

Sean Patterson Photo: Facebook

Officials say they believe Patterson arrived in Jamaica on Dec. 29 with a 30-year-old acquaintance Shane Cameron — a British construction worker — with whom Patterson had booked a 3-night stay at an apartment and then a 5-night stay at the villa starting on Jan. 1. (Patterson's mother on Facebook had referred Cameron as her "godson.")

That day, Patterson and Cameron attended a concert with 34-year-old Oshane Richards, a local construction worker who police say was deported from the U.K. in 2013 after serving 33 months for crack cocaine possession. 

The three returned to the villa together around 5:00 a.m. and "retired to separate rooms," Bailey said.

Richards and Patterson woke up around noon and went to the pool deck, where police said Richard told them that both men made phone calls. Richards alleged told police that his back was turned to Patterson when he heard "several loud explosions that sounded like gunshots."

Richards allegedly said he turned around and saw a man in a black hooded sweatshirt firing on Patterson with a handgun, and fled.

When police arrived, Patterson had died from 12 gunshot wounds to the head and torso, the New York Post reported.

Patterson, Bailey said, had an "extension criminal record for a number of offenses, which include narcotics, violence and firearm."

"Our investigation so far has theorized that the murder was a contract killing that emanated from Britain," Bailey added. "There is no evidence that Patterson was robbed or has any connection to Jamaica

“I’ve lost my baby,” Patterson’s mother, Lesley Wright, 63, told the Daily Mail. “No mother should have to bury her child.”

Patterson’s family said he’d traveled to Jamaica to meet his father’s family for the first time, according to the British tabloid.

“He’d been having the time of his life,” Wright added. “He sent me a photo of himself basking in the sunshine and a video of himself leaping off a cliff into the sea.”

In a Facebook post responding to Bailey's press conference, she admitted her son had served time for drug possession but said that, after his conviction, he hadn't "looked back."

Patterson is survived by his fiancé, with whom he'd had a 13-year relationship, according to his mother on Facebook and the U.K. news outlet LBC. The 33-year-old, who came from a large family, had three brothers and four sisters. He worked as a personal trainer in London.

“We need justice, we want justice, he deserves justice because he was somebody,” Patterson’s father, Alan Patterson, told ITV News London.

The grieving father said he was struggling to “process” the loss of his son.

“His name was Sean Alan Patterson, loved by all people in West London,” Alan Patterson said. “Everywhere he went he was loved. He just had that mannerism that just took people over and they took that light away from us.”