HOPEFUL that bandits would quickly leave her on the day of her 22nd birthday, Alicia Joseph and her boyfriend, Rodney Rodriguez, gave up all their valuables after being held up on Upper Francois Valley Road, Belmont.

Despite this, one of the bandits, as he fled, turned and fatally shot the woman in the side of her head on Thursday evening.

"Look what they do my baby nah!" exclaimed a grieving Rodriguez outside the Forensic Science Centre in St James yesterday.

The couple were headed to a birthday lime for Joseph in St James when they stopped off at a friend's house in Belmont at around 6 p.m. "We was going up to the lime, we just stop to check a friend up in Belmont and we stand up on the corner talking. Things was normal," Rodriguez said.

While the couple stood on the pavement talking with their friends mere metres away from the St Francois Girls' College, two gunmen ran up to them announcing a robbery. They pushed the group against the couple's car.

"We give them everything, I even give them the keys to the car and they dropped them on the ground, saying 'we eh come for no car'," said Rodriguez, 39, who lived with Joseph in St James.

The bandits stripped the couple of all of their jewelry and money and started to run off. At that point, Rodriguez believed the couple would have been able to enjoy the rest of the evening.

Rodriguez said he already had had drinks sent to a club in Upper Bournes Road, St James, for his girlfriend's birthday celebration. She never made it there as even after getting all the loot, one of the bandits was not satisfied.

"One of them just turn and start to shoot; one bullet came out, and I stop hearing my baby," Rodriguez recounted. Joseph was taken to the Port of Spain General Hospital, where she died undergoing emergency surgery.

"Justice too good for them," said an unforgiving Rodriguez of his girlfriend's killers yesterday.

Joseph was hoping to enlist in the Regiment when she reached the required age, Rodriguez added. He had hoped to marry the woman, with whom he had shared a relationship for more than three years, relatives said. "I feeling real empty ... like it have nobody outside for me again," Rodriguez said.

Relatives of Joseph described the girl as one who would never shy away from smiling and enjoyed living life.

No one has been held in connection with the shooting.

Officers from the Homicide Bureau are investigating.