The Tribune

THE killing of a Bahamian man in Nassau has complicated a high-profile murder investigation in Miami, according to law enforcement officials in that city.

Randolph Almanto Coakley, who was shot and killed on Johnson Road last week, was a “key figure” in the 2002 murder of Broward County teenager Marissa Karp, whose body was found in a garbage bag dumped in an Everglades, a report in the Miami Herald said.

The report said the death of Coakley, “a fugitive in a separate 2002 double murder in Sunrise linked to the Bahamian narcotics trade, will make it even tougher to finally close the books on the murder of a troubled 17-year-old runaway whose death led to an overhaul of the state’s child welfare agency”.

It quoted Sunrise police spokesman Sgt Rodney Hailey as saying that several law enforcement agencies had been trying for years to detain Coakley, whom he described as Karp’s former boyfriend, along with another suspect, but both managed to escape to the Bahamas.

“I am not going to say the death is unfortunate because of the lifestyle he led and what he is accused of doing,’’ Sgt Hailey is quoted as saying. But he added, “It’s a setback for the case.”

According to the Herald, Marissa’s father Gary Karp was disappointed over this latest turn of events.

“Can’t catch a break,’’ he wrote on his Facebook page. “The never-ending story. It’s not over Marissa we will get justice for you!! I promise! Love always Dad.”

Police believe that if Coakley, officially considered a “person of interest’’ in Karp’s murder, didn’t kill the victim himself, he probably knew who did, the report said.

It added: “It was a tragic ending for a troubled young woman, whose life fell into a downward spiral after the death of her mother in 1996.

“Karp, who attended middle school and Piper High School in Sunrise, struggled after her father remarried. Family relations eventually became so strained that he placed her in the custody of Florida’s Department of Children and Families.

“She was in and out of foster care for years. In the months before her death, she ran away from a Pompano Beach centre for troubled youths, which landed her among 393 children then labelled by the agency as ‘missing.’ Though the state couldn’t locate her, Collier County investigators found she had stayed in contact with her family through phone calls once she had moved in with Coakley and others who shared the apartment. But she was so far off the official radar screen, it took a month for investigators to even figure out who she was.”

Last week Friday, the Royal Bahamas Police Force identified the body of Coakley, who was shot and killed the night before, while sitting with two other men outside a home on Bartlett Street off Johnson Road.

A man in a blue hooded jacket approached from the bushes on the opposite side of the street shortly after 1pm and opened fire, police said.

Supt Paul Rolle, head of the Central Detective Unit, said the shooter “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 Honda Accord which approached shortly after the culprit opened fire and was driven by an unidentified man.

According to reports in the Florida Sun Sentinel, efforts by US law enforcement to detain Coakley were hampered by the Bahamas’ difficult extradition process.

“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 was quoted as saying.