Klansman Gang faction linked to trio of 2017 Dunbeholden killings, court hears

Three slayings carried out near the Dunbeholden main road in St Catherine on separate dates in 2017 have been attributed by Crown prosecutors to alleged operatives of the Tesha Miller faction of the Klansman Gang.

According to the prosecution, the bloodshed unfolded between August and November of that year, claiming the lives of Richard Gray and two other men whose names have been withheld. A fourth man was wounded.

A deputy superintendent of police was the final witness to mount the stand on Wednesday in the continuing Home Circuit Division trial of 25 men accused of belonging to the criminal network. He told the court that he personally tasked investigators with looking into the double murder and the wounding-with-intent matter of August 5, 2017, as well as the killing of Gray on November 28, 2017. Each offence, he noted, occurred close to the Dunbeholden roadway.

Describing the August scene, the senior officer said he came upon a motor car "in the middle of the road with the doors open". Inside, he said, were bloodstains and a number of spent shell casings.

When he returned to the same stretch of road in November, the officer said, he found the body of a man inside a shop bearing "what appeared to be gunshot wounds". Six spent casings, a damaged bullet and a blood sample were retrieved from that location, the court was told.

The deputy superintendent, then attached to the St Catherine South division, said no one had been taken into custody for any of the killings during his tenure there. He added that he had been "made aware of" a possible suspect in Gray's murder, but that person was subsequently killed.

Travis Drummond is named on count eight of the indictment in connection with the murder of Gray. Counts three, four and six — covering the August 5, 2017 double murder and the wounding of another man — name Tesha Miller, Rolando Jermaine Hall and Michael Wildman. The senior officer is expected to resume his testimony on Thursday.

Elsewhere in the proceedings, the Crown pressed on with its case against Michael Wildman, Jerome Spike, Nashuan Guest and Geovaughni McDonald, who stand accused on counts 15 and 16 of "knowingly facilitating the commission" of the 2020 robbery and murder of Noah Smith in St Andrew.

A detective corporal among the first responders to that crime scene told the court Smith was discovered face down in a pool of blood inside the kitchen of a St Andrew residence, his hands and feet tied. She said she subsequently travelled to a Kingston morgue, where, with an acquaintance of the deceased, she watched the post-mortem examination. The acquaintance had given evidence on Monday that he formally identified Smith's body at the morgue on March 9, 2020.

Under cross-examination, defence counsel Paul Gentles pressed the corporal on her identification of Smith, suggesting she had only viewed him from the side at the residence. The witness pushed back, saying she had bent down to look directly at his face and that his clothing, together with the bound hands and feet she observed both at the scene and at the morgue, removed any doubt for her. Gentles maintained that her account contained material gaps, but the corporal held firm. Her cross-examination is set to continue at a later sitting.

The 25 men in the dock — the second Klansman Gang faction to face the courts — are answering to 16 charges that the Crown alleges span a five-year window between August 2017 and November 2022.