Deane’s day

WESTERN BUREAU:

Mario Deane’s mother, Mercia Fraser, the first witness to testify at the trial of the three police officers implicated in her son’s death, yesterday painted a graphic picture of the battered, bruised, and unresponsive state in which she saw her son on August 3, 2014. She rushed to the Cornwall Regional Hospital in Montego Bay, St James, where he had been admitted following a brutal beating at the Barnett Street Police Station in the Second City.

The trial, which is taking place in the Westmoreland Circuit Court, where it was transferred last November after almost 10 years of administrative bungling in St James. The court is seeking to determine if Corporal Elaine Stewart and Constables Juliana Clevon and Marlon Grant, who were on duty at the Barnett Street facility at the time of the beating, bear any responsibility for Deane’s death.

“I was led into the Accident and Emergency Department [at the hospital] by a worker because I told them what I had come about. I was led to a young man who I identified as Mario Deane … . He was lying on a bed with instruments strung all over him, like drips and a life support machine strapped to his mouth, with a piece of the instrument down in his mouth,” Fraser recounted in her evidence-in-chief.

“I noticed there was a dark mark on his neck and his cheek, and his head was really swollen. One of his eyes was puffed out, and the other seemed to have a cut mark over it,” continued Fraser, pointing to parts of her own face for emphasis.

Fraser also told the court that she visited her son on August 5, 2014, before he died the following day, and further added that she attended his autopsy at the hospital on September 2, where she again identified him.

Under cross-examination from Clevon’s lawyer, Dalton Reid, Fraser confirmed that she last saw Deane in April 2014 when he visited her at home. She also noted that she would periodically visit her son at his home in Rose Mount, St James, prior to the time of his arrest on August 3 of that year.

The trial got under way yesterday morning after High Court Justice Courtney Daye excused a juror on medical grounds. It was the same juror whose absence delayed the start of the proceedings, which were slated to start on Tuesday. Another juror was empanelled to fill the slot, ensuring the required seven-member panel.

The trial is set to continue this morning with a police witness slated to testify for the prosecution. Stewart, Clevon, and Grant are charged with manslaughter, misconduct in a public office, and taking steps to pervert the course of justice. It is also alleged that Stewart, who was the senior officer on duty, ordered the cleaning of the cell where the beating had take place before a scheduled visit by investigators from the Independent Commission of Investigations.

Deane, who was 31 years old at the time of his death, was on his way to work on the morning of August 3, 2014, when he was accosted by a police patrol in his Rose Mount, Montego Bay, home community. During a search of his person, he was found with a small quality of ganja and was arrested and taken to the Barnett Street Police Station, where he was charged.

Shortly after he was arrested, a friend went to bail him out, but the friend was told to come back at 5 p.m. When the friend returned at the designated time, Deane had already been beaten and admitted to hospital in an unresponsive state. He died three days later without regaining consciousness.

christopher.thomas@gleanerjm.com