Dubbing the deaths of 17 prisoners in a fire last month a “massacre,” a former Camp Street prison inmate yesterday testified that the officer-in-charge (OC) of the jail, Kevin Pilgrim, was not fit to run the facility.
During his testimony at the continuing Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the deaths, Patrick Narine stated that Director of Prisons Carl Graham and other named senior officials are men he considers capable of running the prison.
He related that after the disturbances at the Camp Street jail, including the March 3rd fire, he saw Graham, and told him that Pilgrim was unfit to be the OC.
The man, who has been the resident of three separate penal institutions, at Berbice, Lusignan, and Georgetown after being convicted on a narcotics charge, labelled Pilgrim as incompetent. His opinion, he said, stemmed from an incident he witnessed while Pilgrim was stationed in Berbice. Narine was released from the Georgetown prison on March 17th, 2016.
He alleged that Pilgrim had indicated to them at the time that the institution was one for discipline and that if they could not get along, he would put them in a cell for them to kill each other. Selwyn Pieters, the Joint Services’ attorney, contended that Pilgrim’s declaration was merely a manner of speaking used by Guyanese, suggesting that his mother or even grandmother would have said the same thing.
Pieters then went on to question Narine’s suitability to pass judgement on Pilgrim’s competence, given that he has no qualifications to do such.
The day after the fire, an emotional Pilgrim took responsibility for the prisoners’ deaths as the officer-in-charge.
“I don’t have to wait on an inquiry or an investigation to personally say sorry. Simply because of the fact that I am responsible for a prison location and the laws of Guyana would have stated clearly that as an officer in charge you have to be responsible for everyone under your charge,” he had told a news conference.
In his testimony, Narine recalled seeing Pilgrim on March 3rd, go up to the Capital B division armed with a gun. He said he cranked the weapon and told the inmates that it was their last warning to exit the building.
Trevor Williams, of the Capital B division, told the tribunal that it was now on-leave Deputy Prisons Director Gladwin Samuels, not Pilgrim, who had been standing at the door to Capital B and told him to exit but he was afraid because he had a gun.
Narine stated that the first time he saw Samuels, whom he said had been wearing a white shirt and hat, the fire had already started. Like the prisoners before him, he said Samuels passed the order for the door to the Capital A dorm, where the inmates died, to be locked and to let the prisoners burn. Narine said that he could already see smoke coming from the front door of the division.
Inmate Roy Jacobs, like Narine, had previously testified to not seeing Samuels at the beginning. The resident of the Woods Division said he did not see Samuels until after a search began and inmate Shaka McKenzie, allegedly ran back to the Capital A dorm and shut the door after the takedown of a prisoner. He said Samuels appeared “out of the blue” and took over.
In testimonies before this, however, inmates had testified to seeing Samuels standing at the door to Capital B with gun in hand, urging prisoners to exit, or hearing inmates relate such to them. There were also testimonies claiming that Samuels had been dressed in riot gear and had been leading the task force when the search began.
Prisoner Carl Browne had alleged hearing inmates yell, “Look Samuels and the task force in the yard,” before going to a window to see himself. This was said to take place before the search initiated. Under questioning from Pieters, Browne, who resides in the Old Capital building, just a few feet from the new Capital A block, maintained that it was Samuels he saw, while stating that he has known him for years.
Even Collis Collison, the prisoner who was aggressively taken away by the task force during the routine search on the prison’s tarmac on March 3rd, had not testified to seeing Samuels until much later in the reception area when he had come with notepad in hand to find out what occurred. Samuels, however, had been called away before the statement could be taken.
It is attorney Pieters’ position that the Deputy Director had not been in the prison yard until approximately half hour after the event began, as he was on his way back from Bartica.
In terms of the efforts of the prison wardens, the witness stated that he saw a prison officer cut open the door of the Capital A dorm with a steel cutter, but believed that at this point, the prisoners had already died because he no longer heard any sound coming from the dorm. After that, he said inmates of the Old Capital building, who had broken out, went in with buckets of water they had gotten from their division. He further related that the joint of the hose brought into the yard by the firefighters had slipped and by the time they got it fixed, there seemed to be no water remaining.
Narine pointed out that a prison officer, identified as “Lyken,” had been taping the events but stated that the footage may not be a true reflection of the event as parts may be edited out.
