Ex-Scene-of-Crime Officer Tells Court No Car Documents Recovered After Acadia Drive Killings

A retired constable who processed the scene of a deadly police shooting in St Andrew has told the Home Circuit Court that no vehicle documents were among the items recovered after three men were killed in January 2013.

Giving evidence yesterday via video link from abroad, the former scene-of-crime officer was cross-examined by defence attorney John Jacobs. He confirmed that he had carried out a thorough examination of the car the men were travelling in and the surrounding area where the vehicle had been parked, but none of the photographs displayed during the proceedings captured any car papers.

“Would you agree with me that none of the pictures shown to you from Monday to now shows any car papers?” Jacobs put to the witness. “Correct,” the witness, who had taken the scene photographs, replied.

He further stated that a driver’s licence retrieved as part of the probe had been neatly stored inside a wallet.

That testimony stands in contrast to evidence given earlier by two Crown witnesses, among them Agriculture Minister Floyd Green, who said they had seen one of the men, since deceased, with what looked like vehicle documents in his hand shortly before the gunfire erupted. The pair told the court they had watched portions of the incident unfold through a third-floor window of an apartment block along Acadia Drive in St Andrew.

Facing trial in connection with the killings of Eucliffe Dyer, Matthew Lee and Mark Allen on Acadia Drive on January 12, 2013, are Simroy Mott, Donovan Fullerton and constables Orandy Rose, Andrew Smith and Sheldon Richards.

Continuing under cross-examination, the witness explained that evidential samples gathered from the scene had been bagged, sealed and turned over to the storekeeper at the scene-of-crime headquarters. He admitted, however, that he was not in a position to say when those items were subsequently retrieved from the storekeeper and forwarded to the laboratory.

The witness conceded that the date stamped on the laboratory receipt would only indicate the day the items were lodged with the lab, even though established protocol requires that exhibits be delivered to the lab on the same day they are collected.

Responding to questions from attorney Hugh Wildman, the former officer said he was not able to say whether materials taken from the scene displayed any signs of distortion. He added that, on arrival, investigators were concentrating on locating evidence and were not assessing the scene for possible contamination.

As the hearing progressed, the witness indicated that he could not verify that shirts produced in court were the very ones he had removed from the bodies of the deceased at the funeral home. He noted that while he recognised his own handwriting on the envelope used to store the items, he could not vouch for the shirts being the same garments because the package had been opened and re-sealed by lab personnel.

The envelope, he said, had originally carried a blue seal placed there by him but now bore a red one. The shirts were therefore marked for identification only and not formally entered as exhibits.

In other developments, post-mortem reports for the three men were read into the record, with the court hearing that each died as a result of multiple gunshot wounds.

The trial resumes today.