Investigator says omissions in statement not a matter of forgetting
Published:Tuesday | December 14, 2021 | 12:12 AMTanesha Mundle/Staff Reporter
An investigator in the Clansman-One Don Gang case yesterday brushed aside questions from a defence lawyer about omissions in his statement, claiming he had only recorded what was “dominant” and “readily comes to mind”.
Among the omissions agreed to by the detective sergeant, who was under cross-examination from attorney-at-law Denise Hinson in the Home Circuit Court yesterday, was the registration plate number of the gang’s ‘Duppy Truck’ which he said he had recorded in his notebook. The cops recalled seeing the number on the car from which men had reportedly fired at his service vehicle and were later shot dead by other police officers.
He also agreed to omitting including in his statement that prior to the shooting, he had spotted a man in a hoodie with a firearm.
The cop had testified that acting on police information, he and the lead investigator had travelled to Martin Street in Spanish Town, St Catherine, on January 25, 2019, and was a part of a larger police team whose mission that day was to prevent members of the One Don Gang from carrying out a shooting in the area.
According to the officer, when he arrived on Martin Street he saw a man in a hoodie with a gun, and shortly after, men in a brown Toyota Axio fired at the back of the car he was in.
He had told the court that when he and his colleague gave chase, the car eluded them, but he later got information about a shooting and when he went to the scene at Port Henderson Road in Spanish Town, he saw two men who appeared lifeless and the brown car riddled with bullet holes.
The brown car, the court heard, was nicknamed the Duppy Truck and was used whenever the gang was going on shootings or executions.
However, when asked by Hinson why he had not included spotting the armed man in a hoodie in his statement, the investigator indicated that he had no reason to do so.
But in the same vein, he said, “I was writing a statement and the things that are dominant were what readily comes to mind”, even though he had admitted to referring to his notebook while recording the statement.
At the same time, the detective sergeant agreed that the presence of the brown car and the licence plate number would have been dominant as well as the men who he had seen in the car, although he was not able to identify any of the men.
During cross-examination, the witness also admitted that he had not written in his statement that one of the Crown’s star witnesses, a former gang member, had told him when he was arrested at his home that he would have been killed if he did not carry out the gang’s orders.
“There are many things that I could have written in my statement,” he casually said when Hinson first pointed out that that was nowhere in his statement.
When pressed further, he added that it was not a case of him forgetting that it had happened.
‘OBVIOUS’ OMISSIONS
The lawyer then asked him again if he would agree that he did not put it in his statement, to which he replied, “It’s obvious that I didn’t.”
In the meantime, a police inspector who took the stand yesterday testified that the police had been investigating the Clansman Gang from 2015, and at the time, was trying to nab more than 50 alleged gang members, including its reputed leader Tesha Miller, as well as Andre ‘Blackman’ Bryan, the alleged leader of the One Don Gang – a breakaway faction of Clansman.
The officer, who corroborated the evidence of the two investigators pertaining to the arrest of Bryan and his brother Kevaugn Green in 2018 and the police’s search for human remains in Waterloo, Spanish Town, will face cross-examination when the trial resumes today.
Bryan and 32 other alleged gang members are being tried on an indictment with 25 counts under the Criminal Justice (Suppression of Criminal Organizations) Act and the Firearms Act.