Through the God-sent phenomenon we know as the internet, I am able to keep abreast of some of the happenings in St Kitts-Nevis and, admittedly, some of it has made me less than happy.
Foremost in my mind is the shooting death of Clive Williams who was a man in my age group, from Old Road. The reports suggest that he had just left a shop where he had purchased some food and was heading home to consume and, in all likelihood, share it with his family. He was among four persons hit by gunfire but was the sole fatality.
Reports are that, sometime before that, a Defense Force Office, Louis Richards was wounded in the buttocks when someone discharged a weapon in his direction. The details as to what transpired immediately thereafter are unclear but Officer Richards allegedly returned fire hitting the four persons mentioned earlier.
However, as if on a mission, the authorities began to appear to favour Officer Richards. They immediately started to blunder, thereby bungling the entire situation. Seemingly, they were undecided as to whether or not to arrest him. The incident happened on Friday August 3rd, 2007 but he was formally arrested and charged, only on August 29th, 2007, a whopping 26 days later. I gleaned nothing from the reports to suggest that he was a fugitive so I assume that they knew his whereabouts at all times.
Approximately a week into the fiasco, I learned that the Director of Public Prosecutions issued a directive for Richards to be arrested and charged but that went unheeded.
When the officer was finally arrested, instead of being housed in Her Majesty’s Prison in Basseterre, he was taken to the Cayon Police Station, which is contrary to regular police procedure. In any situation where an accused murderer is arrested by officers from, say, the Cayon Police Station, he would be taken to the Cayon Police Station then transferred to Police Headquarters in Basseterre. He would then be surrendered to Her Majesty’s Prison to await trial.
While this travesty was being discussed in the public domain Toni Frederick of WINNFM asked Lt. Kayode Sutton, Public Affairs of the SKANDF, whether or not he could confirm that the officer was being held at Cayon. Although he confirmed that the officer was “…still a soldier…” and that the SKANDF was sending him three meals per day, he declined to answer, indicating that Ms. Frederick should “…ask the police where they are keeping him…”.
My problem with Lt. Sutton’s response is that, if one appears to be hiding something chances are that one is. To further advance the argument, I would suggest that if there were nothing wrong with the idea that the office was being in Cayon there would have been no need for Lt. Sutton to morph into the Artful Dodger.
Major Leroy “Fishy” Percival joined the chorus when he gave an exclusive interview to SKNVIBES.COM, describing the charge of murder as “…strange…”. He further intimated that “…the intent to kill must be proven…”. In fairness to him, he stopped short of explaining Officer Richards’ intent when he [Officer Richards] allegedly aimed his weapon in the direction of other human beings and discharged it multiple times. As a man whose chosen profession is that of soldering, Major Percival must know the velocity at which a bullet rushes from the barrel of a gun and that it tears a path through the human body where there are vital organs that the skeleton and the dermatological membrane serve to protect. A bullet cuts through the skin as if it were not there, shatters bones then makes a mess of whichever internal organ(s) it makes contact with. How can Officer Richards not have known that any one of his bullets carried with it, the potential to kill someone? That is left for him to explain when he has his day in court.
Let me return to my assertion that the authorities bungled the process. Let us assume that a matter of this magnitude could not have happened without there being significant awareness within the corridors of power. Assuming that the word on the street is correct in that the DPP ordered the arrest of the officer a week into the fiasco, the police could not have ignored her without there being some serious repercussions felt from above. Neither could there have been the retrogression of taking a remanded prisoner to a police station, instead of from it, as has been the case throughout the annals of policing in this country. I, therefore, find it disingenuous of anyone within the inner sanctum of power to claim ignorance, even after the arrest of the officer.
If a monkey comes up against a predator and does anything other than head for the nearest tree, something is wrong, because his instinct tells him that the tree is his refuge. Police officers are trained people who have had inculcated in them a law-borne instinct. That instinct tells them that a person charged with a non-bailable offence goes from the police station to Her Majesty’s Prison. Any deviation from that raises red flags and can certainly not be the product of a policeman’s mind; given that it goes against the grain of everything he was trained to do.
By behaving as if their activities were scripted for them, the police were made to look less than the professionals they truly are. One understands that the force is a creature of the government and that they are duty bound to respond to certain directives. However, they have to be allowed the latitude to ply their trade in the way they were trained to, and not as the puppets that some would have them be. Left to themselves, I truly believe that they would have handled the matter of Officer Louis Richards quite differently and to the greater satisfaction of the family of the late Clive Williams.
