US Student Celebrating in Belize Killed Outside Nightclub

J’Bria Bowens was celebrating her father's birthday in Belize on Friday night when the American 23-year-old was killed by a stray bullet from an assault-style rifle. Bowens, a nursing student at Louisiana State University, was sitting on a golf cart outside a nightclub in San Pedro, a tourist town in the Caribbean Sea island of Ambergris Caye about 13 miles off the Belize mainland, when she was struck, NOLA.com reports. She was rushed to a hospital but pronounced dead upon arrival, WAFB reports. Brothers Delson and Tionne Paguada have been arrested in her murder; police say they started shooting and Bowens was hit, but was not their intended target.

Rather, police believe the shots may have been intended for someone standing near the club's entrance, a suspected leader of a local drug gang who is currently being sought for questioning. "The tourist was not the intended target," the police commissioner says. "It just happened that she was in the line of fire of these two factions." The US has a Level 2 travel advisory in effect for Belize due to high levels of violent crime, and Bowens is the second tourist to have been killed in San Pedro in recent years. In 2019, a Virginia cardiologist was fatally shot. (More Belize stories.)