Trinidad: Med school dropout sent for psych eval over death threats to Top Cop, wife

(Trinidad Guardian) A 35-year-old Princes Town man ac­cused of is­su­ing death threats to Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith and his wife has been sent for a psy­chi­atric eval­u­a­tion.

Mahin­dra Ram­nath, a med­ical school dropout from Palmyra Vil­lage, was re­mand­ed to the St Ann’s Psy­chi­atric Hos­pi­tal when he ap­peared be­fore Mag­is­trate Sa­nara Toon-Mc­Quilkin in the Port-of-Spain Mag­is­trates Court Thurs­day.

Ram­nath was not called up­on to plead to mis­us­ing a tele­phone to send the threat to the Grif­fiths, as Toon-Mc­Quilkin opt­ed to wait un­til she re­ceives his men­tal health as­sess­ment.

Ac­cord­ing to po­lice re­ports, around 1.30 am on Wednes­day morn­ing the TTPS com­mand cen­tre re­ceived call threat­en­ing Grif­fith and his wife NicoleDy­er-Grif­fith.

The male caller, whose num­ber was reg­is­tered, re­port­ed­ly said: “I want to sum­mon Gary Grif­fith for defama­tion of char­ac­ter against me to­mor­row in court, or else I will call him and chop off he (ex­ple­tive) moth­er (ex­ple­tive) head. How you like that? And kill he wife Nicole Dy­er… huh moth­er (ex­ple­tive).”

The call was traced and Ram­nath was ar­rest­ed at his home around 4 pm Wednes­day. He was charged by act­ing In­sp Ra­jesh Gokool of the Port-of-Spain CID.

If even­tu­al­ly con­vict­ed of the charge, Ram­nath would face a $200 fine or up to a month in prison.

Ram­nath, who was rep­re­sent­ed by at­tor­ney Sub­has Pan­day, will reap­pear in court on De­cem­ber 4.

Ram­nath was the sec­ond per­son to be charged over mak­ing death threats to Grif­fith this week.

Hours af­ter Ram­nath al­leged­ly placed the call, a 12-year-old school­boy from east Port-of-Spain plead­ed guilty to mak­ing a sim­i­lar threat to Grif­fith on Sun­day morn­ing.

In that case, E999 op­er­a­tor re­ceived a call from a bmo­bile num­ber where a male caller said: “We are com­ing to kill Gary Grif­fith.”

The call was then trans­ferred to the E999’s po­lice cor­po­ral on du­ty, where the caller re­peat­ed his threat to kill Grif­fith. The caller then ex­tend­ed his death to the po­lice cor­po­ral who took the call. The cor­po­ral im­me­di­ate­ly in­formed the rel­e­vant se­nior of­fi­cers.

The boy, who can­not be named as he is a mi­nor, plead­ed guilty to the crime when he ap­peared be­fore Mas­ter Nazeera Ali in the Chil­dren’s Court Wednes­day. He was re­leased in­to his par­ents’ cus­tody and is ex­pect­ed to reap­pear in court for sen­tenc­ing on Jan­u­ary 16.