By Belize Live News Staff: He was pedalling home from his farm, a routine ride he must have made countless times. He never reached the village. San Lazaro is in mourning after 68-year-old watchman Virginio Carrillo was ambushed and chopped to death on a quiet sugar road Monday morning.
The Belize Police Department reports that word of a chopping incident came in at 9:44 a.m. on Monday, July 13, 2026, sending officers to a stretch of sugar road about a quarter mile off the main road in San Lazaro Village, Orange Walk District. There they found Carrillo face down and lifeless, bearing multiple chop wounds to the head and neck among other injuries.
Everything at the scene pointed to a lying-in-wait attack. Carrillo’s bicycle lay roughly 15 feet away, blood on its handle. Deeper in the bush on the opposite side, police discovered a second bicycle, grey in colour, and nearby, a machete stained with suspected blood, apparently discarded by the killer in flight.
Investigators believe Carrillo was riding from his farm toward the village when his attacker sprang from the bushes, cut him down, abandoned the grey bicycle, and fled.
The elderly man was rushed to the Northern Regional Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 11:32 a.m. He was identified by his son, and his body now awaits a post mortem examination.
Police have processed both the scene and the recovered exhibits, taken several statements, and identified two men they are looking to speak with. With no one detained and no charges laid, their names are not being published.
For a quiet farming village, the killing of a 68-year-old grandfather figure on a road he knew by heart is a wound of its own. The question of who lay waiting in those bushes, and why, now rests with investigators, and with anyone in San Lazaro who knows something.
Information can be shared with the nearest police station or anonymously through Crime Stoppers at 922.
