Tucker residents protest
MONTEGO BAY — It has been almost a year and a half since 25 year-old Aston Watson was killed in an alleged shoot-out and four other men arrested on firearms charges after an early morning, high-speed chase by the police.
But the residents of Tucker in St James are still clamouring for “justice”.
They have never accepted police reports that any of the men before the courts — 21 year-old Sylburn “Junior” Longman, 24 year-old Kevin Robinson, Richard Jackson and Paul Whyte – were armed. They do not believe that they fired at the lawmen. And they believe Aston was killed in cold blood.
The five men, travelling in a green Toyota Starlett motor car, reportedly led the police on a four-mile, high-speed chase on February 9 of last year. The police reported that the men were signalled to stop while travelling along the Reading main road but decided to outrun the lawmen. While on the Bogue road, they allegedly opened fire on the police officers who were in pursuit; then crashed the car in Tucker and engaged the police in a gun battle. At the end of it all, Watson was dead, and the four other men slapped with charges of possession of firearms and shooting with intent.
The police also reported that three 9mm spent shells were found in the men’s car.
Now that the case against the four men is before the courts, the old wounds have reopened and the anger is as fresh as it was the day after Aston’s death when area residents took to the streets in a fiery protest that lasted half-a-day.
They staged a roadblock yesterday, using tree trunks, boulders and old household appliances to block the Tucker main road.
Their concern, this time, surrounds the workings of the court system that denied their four neighbours bail when they appeared in the gun court last week. Residents also repeated old claims that the men in the car had not been armed and that there had never been any evidence found on the scene to support the police’s claims.
They began blocking the streets from about 6:00 am but the police quickly removed much of the debris and allowed vehicular traffic to resume flowing. At 7:00 am, an attempt to block the route to Kempshot was easily thwarted by an officer who manually removed the debris with one hand, his weapon in the other.
Between 7:00 am to 8:00 am, a handful of police officers maintained a presence in the area but no one was arrested as the blockades were, for the most part, unmanned. Later in the day, equipment was sourced from the St James Parish Council and the heavier blockages were removed to the municipal dump by 11:15 am.
But according to residents, they will take their protest to the Montego Bay Gun Court Tuesday when the case against the four men continues.