“My father is a man of few words and barely gets emotional but this time I heard him trying. I immediately got out of bed to see what was wrong and came face to face with a police officer who told me that my uncle had been killed. I had just woken up and barely knew what was going on.”

The next day, Stefan accompanied his father to the morgue to formally identify Raymond. Although his father told him to stay outside, Stefan’s curiosity got the better of him and he ended up peering inside.

“Exactly as I looked inside, I saw my uncle on a stretcher, an image that will never leave my mind,” he said. “Now I know why my father told me not to come inside. It was Uncle Raymond who they shot and left for dead in a pool of blood.”

And Stefan’s trauma didn’t start and end with his uncle’s murder.

“Shortly after my uncle was killed, I was at school during break and some children found out I was Raymond Caruana’s nephew,” he recounted. “I don’t know why but some of them approached me, beat me up and left me under the stair simply because of who my uncle was.”

“It was traumatic. They kicked me in the head, hit me with their schoolbags and I was left unconscious after a minute or so. I didn’t even know that I was left under the stairs.”

Police ended up arresting and charging a man, Peter Paul Busuttil, with Raymond Caruana’s murder but it turned out to be a frame-up. Caruana’s murder remains unsolved till this day.