The Tribune

THE man gunned down outside a Johnson Road home on Thursday was wanted in connection with a double murder and an attempted murder in Florida.

Police last night identified the country’s latest shooting victim as 38-year-old Randolph Almanto Coakley of Pinewood Gardens.

Police said Coakley. appeared on the TV show “America’s Most Wanted” in August 2012. He was the subject of a manhunt by South Florida police who suspected the Bahamian of shooting three men – killing two and leaving the third paralysed.

Meanwhile, Broward County Sheriff’s Detectives also wanted to question Coakley in the unrelated 2002 murder of 17-year-old Marissa Karp, who was his live-in girlfriend at the time.

Florida police believed that Coakley, who also went by the alias of Shawn Smith, had fled the US and was hiding out in the Bahamas.

However, efforts to detain Coakley were hampered by the Bahamas’ difficult extradition process, according to a report in the Florida Sun Sentinel.

“It would be easier to get them in custody if they left the Bahamas — due to the legalities with extraditing a Bahamian national from the Bahamas,” Sunrise police Detective Sean Visners told the Florida newspaper last year.

Sunrise detectives believed that Coakley’s arrest could have led to answers in the decade-old murder of Karp, which had never been solved.

On Thursday, Coakley was sitting with two other men outside a residence at Bartlett Street, off Johnson Road, when a man in a blue hooded jacket approached from the bushes on the opposite side of the street shortly after 1pm.

Supt Paul Rolle, head of the Central Detective Unit, said: “(The culprit) accosted the deceased and his friends, produced a handgun and began discharging the weapon in the direction of the deceased.

“The deceased got up from the chair where he was sitting and attempted to run into the residence to seek shelter where he was struck multiple times about his body.”

Mr Rolle said the assailant fled the scene in a gold coloured Honda Accord, which approached shortly after the culprit opened fire and was driven by an unidentified man.

Emergency Medical Services officials pronounced Coakley dead at the scene.

Police are investigating and are appealing to members of the public who may have any information regarding this incident to contact police at 919, 322-3333/4, the Central detective unit at 502-9991/502-9990 or Crimestoppers at 328-TIPS.