Cannonier suffers suspected punctured lung
BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – A prisoner on remand was yesterday (May 26) stabbed multiple times to the body while in a cell at Her Majesty’s Prison (HMP) and is currently warded at the JNF General Hospital suffering from a suspected punctured lung.
Information reaching this publication indicates that shortly before 4:00 p.m. yesterday 28-year-old Sheldon ‘Sword’ Cannonier of Neverson Street East, Newtown was stabbed twice in the back, once in the chest and once in the shoulder by a group of prisoners in the prison.
According to the Head of the Criminal Investigation Department, Inspector Franklyn Belgrove, Cannonier was remanded to HMP yesterday after being charged with assault with a firearm.
Belgrove said that following a May 18, 2011 report made against Cannonier, police arrested and charged him on Tuesday (May 24), and yesterday he appeared before a city magistrate who remanded him to prison.
Speaking with one of Cannonier’s sisters, SKNVibes was told family members believe that it was a trumped-up charge and he was deliberately setup by a prison officer who placed him in a cell with a group of men who had always wanted to harm him.
“My brother was held up for an incident of which he is innocent. He was not there when it occurred. The complainant, Markie, told the police that Sheldon went after him at his job and the police held him.
“He was taken to the court yesterday and the magistrate told them to take him to the cell. I spoke to my brother and he told me that when they took him to the cell, the officer asked him if he and anybody in the cell does get on, and he told him no, but the officer still put him in there.
“He said it was about four or five of them in the cell, and when he turned his back everybody just jumped on him and stabbed him. This clearly shows that it was a setup,” the sister said.
She also said that the person who made the report that caused him to be remanded has since flown out of the Federation, and “his actions surely indicate that he wanted the police to go after Sheldon”.
She further said her brother told her that the weapons used to inflict the stab wounds were made from the handle of a bucket.
The young woman claimed that family members were made aware of the incident by a friend, who, on a visit to the hospital, saw when he was taken there.
“The incident happened since minutes to four and nobody from the prison or the police station had the common courtesy to inform us. It was a friend who went to visit someone in the hospital that informed us. So I called my mother and she told me that someone had already informed her about the incident, but it was not an officer.
“I immediately left my home for the hospital and I saw my brother on a bed with tubes in his nose and to his side, and a prison officer was standing guard. I was told that one of his lungs was punctured.
“Other family members came later and I told the officer that it was wrong of them to not inform us about the incident. I told him that I was very upset with them for not telling us anything and that was about after seven. So, he then decided to use his cell phone to call home by my mother,” she explained.
In the absence of the Superintendent of Prisons, this media house made numerous attempts to get a comment from any senior personnel from HMP, but they were all futile.
