Six months after being acquitted of the murder of political activist Courtney Crum-Ewing, Regan Rodrigues, called “Grey Boy”, will again be facing the charge, because the Director of Public Prosecutions has ordered that the case be re-opened.
It was announced on Friday that the DDP, Shalimar Ali-Hack, has remitted the murder case against Rodrigues to Magistrate Judy Latchman for it to be reopened. The Chambers of the DPP has noted that “the sole purpose of this remit is to take further evidence from police witnesses and to rule on the voluntariness of all oral statements of the accused.”
Courtney Crum-Ewing
The DDP has also disclosed that Attorney-at-Law Nigel Hughes has been retained as special prosecutor, to lead the case.
Crum-Ewing, a 40-year-old ex-soldier, was gunned down execution-style on March 10, 2015 while urging residents of the Diamond Housing Scheme on the East Bank of Demerara to go out and cast their ballots in the May 11, 2015 General and Regional Elections.
An autopsy performed on Crum-Ewing revealed he was shot five times.
Several months later, Rodrigues, called “Grey Boy”, was arrested and charged after it was alleged that a gun found at his home was the weapon that had discharged the spent shells found at the crime scene where Crum-Ewing was gunned down.
The murder charge against Rodrigues was, however, dismissed in September 2016, after Magistrate Latchman found that no case has been made against Rodrigues, since the police had failed to prove that he was the one who had pulled the trigger to discharge the bullets that had killed Crum-Ewing.
The magistrate had told the court there was no evidence to suggest that Rodrigues was the trigger man, and that throughout the case, neither the accused nor the supposed evidence against the accused had implicated him in the murder of Crum-Ewing. As such, the case against Rodrigues was discharged.
Rodrigues is currently serving a three-year sentence for escaping from lawful custody, which was handed down in January 2016. At the time of receiving this conviction, he was acquitted of charges of illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition, after the prosecution failed to prove its case.
