St Thomas police weigh instant arrests for overloaded aggregate trucks as parish briefs stack school charges, MOCA school probe, NWA road failure and Accompong poll clash

Commanding officer Deputy Superintendent Rohan Richie has warned that lorry crews caught moving crushed stone above safe limits through St Thomas could be arrested immediately, saying gentler steps such as warnings, tickets and summonses are no longer curbing debris that smears highways and has been tied to smashes.

Speaking at the parish municipal corporation’s monthly session on Thursday, Richie said the division would lean on the National Solid Waste Management Authority Act, treating aggregate that flies off beds as litter that endangers travellers. He accepted firmer action might anger hauliers but said protecting the public came first. He singled out trouble spots including Roacher Gully in White Horses, where scattered stone has repeatedly left the surface treacherous, and noted at least two crashes on police logs blamed on material on the roadway. Councillor Hubert Williams, representing the People’s National Party’s White Horses division, endorsed tougher enforcement, saying in plain terms that road deaths could outpace homicides and that he knew of roughly five incidents linked to stone on the road, far above the two cited in the discussion.

Separately, Superintendent Cerich Mento, who leads the St Elizabeth division, told a corporation meeting on Thursday that police had charged four boys aged 13 and 15 from St Elizabeth Technical High School with assault occasioning actual bodily harm after a bout of brawls on campus last week. Officers are working through the school resource officer programme with guidance staff and the dean of discipline and will keep up outreach inside the school and nearby communities. On the Wednesday before, staff reported seventeen fights at the institution.

The Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency said it and the Jamaica Constabulary Force are jointly probing recent threats aimed at people tied to Stella Maris Preparatory School. MOCA said the JCF has boosted its footprint on the grounds and continues to watch the situation but would not elaborate on an open case. It asked anyone with leads to ring its tipline at 888 MOA tip or Crime Stop at 311. A heavy police deployment has surrounded the St Andrew prep school since last week after an alarming online clip demanded fifty million dollars, threatened administrators and named individuals in the community.

On infrastructure, National Works Agency spokesperson Steven Shaw said a fire beneath a pipe culvert has undermined an embankment along Broadgate to Main Road in St Mary, leaving part of the corridor structurally unsafe. The northbound lane from the Broadgate direction is shut; all movement is being shifted onto the surviving northbound carriageway while crews fence the void. Shaw said emergency repairs will replace the ruined culvert and renewed pleas for care when lighting fires near farmland, livestock or buried structures, noting rain in the area heightens risk for drivers.

Meanwhile, the Accompong Electoral Committee insisted that nomination activities set for Friday in St Elizabeth would go ahead even after Supreme Court judge Justice Enhard Hines on Wednesday granted an interim order pausing nomination and polling steps until 10 June 2026 or until a revised claim is heard. Former colonel Mera Ro, who intends to run in this year’s vote that fell due on 18 February, secured the injunction, alleging that Colonel Richard Curry planned meetings without telling other hopefuls and imposed skewed rules, and calling it absurd to fix nomination day while the voters’ list stayed unfinished.

In a Friday statement the committee, formed under a 2022 constitution it calls the governing frame for the sovereign Accompong polity and said to be led by elder Clav Johnson as board chair, said it learned of the ruling through the press and was startled the court intervened in what it described as an autonomous Maroon electoral process. After talks with lawyers at home and abroad, it concluded nominations on 15 May 2026 should continue, questioned Ro’s three-year residency eligibility to contest, and argued someone whose qualification is doubtful should not stall a process Maroons had awaited, warning that outside interference would dishonour forebears who defended self-rule.