Waiting for answers

Frantic calls to the police resulted in us being told that they would be there in a while, despite being told that due to the nature of the crime there was a very good chance that the perpetrators may still be nearby noting the results of their actions. When they eventually came, they were appallingly ill prepared for the task ahead.

The witness spent over half an hour getting the officer taking the report to understand what she had seen. The other officer, meanwhile, was picking up evidence with his bare hands.

Those of us who had grown up watching cop dramas looked on in horror. We knew this to be a major mistake that could ruin fingerprints and contaminate evidence. The officer accepted the offer of a pair of rubber household gloves. He didn’t even bother to put them on.

Those of us who stood watching pointed to the bushes at the end of the street that led off to a forested area. Walking through this area leads one to the Eastern Main Road.

The witness had seen the perpetrators take off into this bushy area and then stop. We suggested to the police officer that maybe both he and his partner — who had spent most of the time thus far essentially walking around the premises and talking on the phone — go into the bushes as there was a good chance that, even if the criminals weren’t there, there might be further evidence.

The officers took one look at the bushes and said no, the men were long gone and they didn’t leave anything behind. I remember looking at the policemen’s stomachs swelling grotesquely over their belts and not being surprised at their reluctance. After all, these were men who couldn’t be bothered to put on a pair of gloves.

So this latest example of investigative inefficiency in the Akiel Chambers case causes no surprise. After all, this case has been mishandled and mismanaged since Akiel’s death back in 1998. Back then the police ruled his cause of death as accidental drowning. And to this day, apparently, they persist in that view.

This is despite the fact that when he first went missing, the pool was checked and his body was not there. This is also despite the fact that the autopsy revealed that he had been sexually molested just before his death and that evidence strongly suggested he had been suffocated during the act. What person, realising he is drowning, will assume a crouching position? How could a child drown in front of so many people with no one witnessing it?

Accusations of evidence tampering and contamination surprise no one, especially those of us who have had any first hand experience with the police service. What is surprising, and very, very disturbing in its implications, is the callous and brazen indifference Akiel’s family and the public at large are being treated with.

Twenty months of supplementary investigation have led the police to announce they have no "clear suspect" in a murder case they still treat as an accident. And this is despite the presence from the onset of the investigation of DNA evidence that could have revealed — at the very least — who his rapist was, if not his murderer. The lack of accountability has created a miasma of incompetence that reeks to the heavens. One cannot help but wonder, are we supposed to believe our police force is so inefficient or is something else, something more sinister, at play. So now the excuse isn’t that there are no gloves.

The excuse is that there is no legislation that allows the police to collect DNA samples from possible suspects, even though there is no law that says they cannot. Strange, this sudden desire to play strictly by the rules, when it has not been the case before, especially in this case. And suddenly, there is vacillation over accepting Charles James’ offer to fund the DNA testing in the United States, when gifts of cars to assist police in cases being investigated have not been a problem in the past.

The case I outlined earlier was never solved; it was ruled that there were no suspects. The evidence that had been improperly collected was improperly stored.

The case went nowhere until all parties involved eventually moved ahead with the business of living. This cannot happen in Akiel’s case. We cannot allow the molestation of a boy to be dismissed as unimportant.

We cannot allow his death to go unanswered and unpunished. To keep quiet about this enduring example of gross complacency and ineptitude is to accept it and to accept it, is to accept a degeneration and degradation of our collective social consciousness.

Comments? Please write

suszanna@hotmail.com.