Contract from prison might have been placed on murdered Trinidad woman

(Trinidad Guardian) Po­lice are in­ves­ti­gat­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the hit on 36-year-old Can­dy-Ann Mc In­tyre was or­dered from a pris­on­er at the Max­i­mum Se­cu­ri­ty Prison.

Po­lice sources said that homi­cide de­tec­tives be­gan in­ves­ti­gat­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty, hours af­ter Mc In­tyre, a moth­er of four from Quar­ry Road in San Juan, was shot dead af­ter at­tend­ing her 12-year-old son’s grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mo­ny at Green Mead­ows, San­ta Bar­bara Boule­vard in San­ta Cruz, on Tues­day af­ter­noon.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith and of­fi­cers from the Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Re­sponse Team (SORT) vis­it­ed the Max­i­mum Se­cu­ri­ty Prison in Arou­ca where they searched a cell of a pris­on­er, who is sus­pect­ed of call­ing the hit on Mc In­tyre and seized a mo­bile phone.

Po­lice have not ar­rest­ed any of the sus­pects who car­ried out the hit up to late yes­ter­day. In­ves­ti­ga­tors were re­port­ed­ly re­view­ing CCTV footage from near­by res­i­dences and busi­ness places in a bid to iden­ti­fy Mc In­tyre’s at­tack­ers.

Mc In­tyre was one of two State wit­ness­es against three men who were charged with mur­der­ing her rel­a­tive on May 2005.

Two of the three men were con­vict­ed in Oc­to­ber 2012, while the third was or­dered to be re­tried as the ju­ry could not come to a unan­i­mous ver­dict for him. The two con­vict­ed men chal­lenged their con­vic­tions with one be­ing suc­cess­ful and re­ceiv­ing a re­tri­al from the Court of Ap­peal in 2016.

Guardian Me­dia has with­held the iden­ti­ty of the ac­cused men in an ef­fort not to prej­u­dice their even­tu­al re­tri­als, which are ex­pect­ed to come up for hear­ing soon.

Ac­cord­ing to the sum­ma­ry of ev­i­dence from the ap­peal over the first tri­al, Mc In­tyre, a fe­male rel­a­tive and an in-law were at the fam­i­ly’s home at San Juan, when three gun­men am­bushed an­oth­er rel­a­tive.

The male rel­a­tive fled the scene, while Mc In­tyre re­port­ed­ly ran in­side, hid and mon­i­tored what was tran­spir­ing. Her fe­male rel­a­tive op­posed one of the gun­men and was shot. She sur­vived by pre­tend­ing to be dead.

“On the night in ques­tion Can­dy–Ann was able to see the whole bod­ies of the men in­clud­ing their faces and ob­served them for about five sec­onds dur­ing which time she fo­cused on their faces,” ac­cord­ing to a sum­ma­ry of the pros­e­cu­tion’s case.

Dur­ing the first tri­al of the case, State pros­e­cu­tors had to ap­ply to the judge to de­clare the male rel­a­tive, who wit­nessed the crime, dead as he dis­ap­peared af­ter he gave ev­i­dence in the pre­lim­i­nary in­quiry of the case. He has nev­er been found.

In the at­tempt to have his tes­ti­mo­ny from the in­quiry used in the tri­al, pros­e­cu­tors pre­sent­ed ev­i­dence that he had not used his pass­port to leave the coun­try and that the woman he was last seen alive with was mur­dered two weeks af­ter he dis­ap­peared.

A sim­i­lar but less com­pli­cat­ed process is ex­pect­ed to be used to ten­der Mc In­tyre’s de­po­si­tion in­to ev­i­dence at the two men’s re­tri­al.

A post mortem is ex­pect­ed to be per­formed on Mc In­tyre’s body at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre in St James, tomorrow.

Mc In­tyre’s killing raised the mur­der toll for the year to 243.

Con­tact­ed on Wednes­day, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young sent con­do­lences to her fam­i­ly and de­scribed her death as a tragedy.

Young con­firmed that Mc In­tyre was not a part of his min­istry’s wit­ness pro­tec­tion pro­gramme and stat­ed that her death could not be at­trib­uted to it.

“We at Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty must and will con­tin­ue the fight against crim­i­nal­i­ty,” Young said.