The bullet fragments that Mervyn Darling says supports his claim of being fired upon by police.
By AVA TURNQUEST
Tribune Staff Reporter
aturnquest@tribunemedia.net
A MAN who says he was chased and shot at by plain-clothes police claims he has new evidence. Mervin Darling, 40, said he has found two shell casings that he believes will link police to the shooting incident.
Mr Darling said he found the bullet remnants as he scoured East Street looking for clues following a disappointing meeting with police investigators.
He said: “When I went there last week, they told me they ‘had no leads’ in this investigation. So over the weekend I searched for two days. I didn’t find nothing on Saturday, but on Sunday I went out there and I found these two casings. I almost gave up, you know there was a lot of rain but it was right there just up against the kerb.”
“I’m sure they can look at this, put it under a microscope and be able to tell if these are in fact police bullets or if these were fired by a police weapon.”
Deputy Commissioner of Police Quinn McCartney has confirmed that the police are actively investigating the incident.
Mr Darling, former deputy chairman of the Workers Party, alleged that plain-clothed officers in an unmarked vehicle shot repeatedly at his car as he drove home in the early hours of May 9.
Area residents, who were said to have witnessed the alleged incident, gave their account of the ordeal in an interview with The Tribune at the scene yesterday.
The residents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they were shocked by the incident that unfolded in the street outside their home.
A resident and matriarch, said: “We all heard the shots, we thought someone was shooting into our yard. Everybody had to just get low. I told everybody to get down, put all the children on the floor as soon as we started hearing the shots.
“They shouldn’t have done him like that, it’s wrong, they treated him bad. You know how much people got the police up there (court), suing them. They need to do that, they need to check themselves. Supposed they killed someone, stray bullets can kill someone. [Commissioner] Greenslade need to shake up those crooked police.”
One resident said: “When we came out, they had his throat on the road. Foot on his head. At first I thought he was dead how they were just standing up there. But then after they root up his truck they just let him go. Nothing. I mean you was shooting like that with no motive? They just tell him go, drive off.”
Another resident said: “They had to let him go, they was so shame. They know they was wrong for what they do.”
Mr Darling is employed as a food and beverage consultant for Bahamas Hospitality with responsibility for food and bar service management of various restaurants.
He is also the leader of a fledgling B class Junkanoo Group, the Englerston Pioneers, who plan to make their debut at this year’s Boxing Day parade.
On the eve of the incident, he had just finished work at Traveller’s Rest.
The 40-year-old activist, one of the organisers of Freedom March, said he is now convinced of the need for Bahamians to be armed and trained to protect against rights violations, which he described as casualties of a criminal war zone.
Mr Darling said he attempted to turn over the shell casings to investigators at the Complaints and Corruptions Unit yesterday; however, he did not feel comfortable with the process.
He added that he was sceptical over whether the evidence would be tampered with. Last night, Mr McCartney said he would look into this latest development in the continuing investigation.
Comments
KRS1 10 years, 6 months ago
Maybe now he can send them over to ballistics and get the results back after the next commercial break. Then after that he can get tire thread samples and match them to the type of tires the RBPF uses. Who is this guy kidding anything short of a video tape will get him nowhere. The police force literally gets away with murder in this country. What makes him think they would investigate themselves and show how incompetent and out of control they are.
242orgetslu 10 years, 6 months ago
PLEASE READ AND PASS ON! This is the link where the full story is: http://si.com/vault/article/magazine/MA…
Across the inky-blue Gulf Stream from Florida, near the sheer edge of the Great Bahama Bank, a new island is emerging from the sea. Although it bears the appealing name Ocean Cay, this new island is not, and never will be, a palm-fringed paradise of the sort the Bahamian government promotes in travel ads. No brace of love doves would ever choose Ocean Cay for a honeymoon; no beauty in a brief bikini would waste her sweetness on such desert air. Of all the 3,000 islands and islets and cays in the Bahamas, Ocean Cay is the least lovely. It is a flat, roughly rectangular island which, when completed, will be 200 acres and will resemble a barren swatch of the Sahara. Ocean Cay does not need allure. It is being dredged up from the seabed by the Dillingham Corporation of Hawaii for an explicit purpose that will surely repel more tourists than it will attract. In simplest terms, Ocean Cay is a big sandpile on which the Dillingham Corporation will pile more sand that it will subsequently sell on the U.S. mainland. The sand that Dillingham is dredging is a specific form of calcium carbonate called aragonite, which is used primarily in the manufacture of cement and as a soil neutralizer. For the past 5,000 years or so, with the flood of the tide, waters from the deep have moved over the Bahamian shallows, usually warming them in the process so that some of the calcium carbonate in solution precipitated out. As a consequence, today along edges of the Great Bahama Bank there are broad drifts, long bars and curving barchans of pure aragonite. Limestone, the prime source of calcium carbonate, must be quarried, crushed and recrushed, and in some instances refined before it can be utilized. By contrast, the aragonite of the Bahamian shallows is loose and shifty stuff, easily sucked up by a hydraulic dredge from a depth of one or two fathoms. The largest granules in the Bahamian drifts are little more than a millimeter in diameter. Because of its fineness and purity, the Bahamian aragonite can be used, agriculturally or industrially, without much fuss and bother. It is a unique endowment. There are similar aragonite drifts scattered here and there in the warm shallows of the world, but nowhere as abundantly as in the Bahamas. In exchange for royalties, the Dillingham Corporation has exclusive rights in four Bahamian areas totaling 8,235 square miles. In these areas there are about four billion cubic yards—roughly 7.5 billion long tons—of aragonite. At rock-bottom price the whole deposit is worth more than $15 billion. An experienced dredging company like Dillingham should be able to suck up 10 million tons a year, which will net the Bahamian government an annual royalty of about $600,000.
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