Justice has been served. These were the words of one of the 11 men on trial for the murder of businesswoman Vindra Naipaul-Coolman after he was discharged by presiding Judge Malcolm Holdip during a hearing in the Port-of-Spain High Court yesterday—almost nine years after he was first charged with the crime.
Holdip freed Joel Fraser after upholding his attorneys’ no-case submission which was made after the State closed its case against the accused men in November last year. Fraser’s co-accused, who are all his neighbours, were not as lucky as Holdip dismissed their applications, in which their lawyers claimed that the State had failed to present sufficient evidence linking them to the crime.
Based on his decision on the legal issue, Holdip instructed the 12-member jury and three alternates that they were required to come to a not-guilty verdict for Fraser. After the jury foreman followed the required procedure, Fraser was then allowed to walk out of the court.
As a result of Holdip’s decision the ten remaining accused men will remain on trial and will now be given an opportunity to call witnesses or testify themselves in their defence, before Holdip sums up the case to the jury and allows jurors to deliberate over their guilt or innocence. They will return to court on Monday when the trial is set to resume.
The T&T Guardian understands that Fraser may be called as a defence witness by some of his co-accused.
Naipaul-Coolman, the former chief executive of her family’s supermarket chain, was abducted from her home at Lange Park, Chaguanas, on December 19, 2006. A $122,000 ransom was paid by her family but she was not released and her body has never been found.
Since the trial began in March 2014, prosecutors have claimed that she was held captive in a single-storey red brick house at Upper La Puerta, Diego Martin, before she was killed and her body disposed of.
In addition to circumstantial evidence recovered at the homes of the men, who all lived in the hillside community, prosecutors are relying on the evidence of their main witness Keon Gloster, who was allegedly present but did not participate in the crime.
While testifying last year, Gloster repeatedly claimed that he was coerced by police into implicating the accused men, to most of whom he is related. Gloster was deemed a hostile witness and his sworn statements given to police were tendered into evidence and read to the jury. Prosecutors also claimed that an illegal firearm allegedly found in the possession of the accused men was also linked to spent shells found on the scene of the kidnapping.
Two statements Fraser gave police after he was arrested in May 2007 were also tendered into evidence. In the interviews Fraser admitted that he knew his co-accused as he was related to some and grew up near to the rest. However, he said, he did not interact much with them as they were “not in his age group.”
Fraser also denied any wrongdoing claiming that he was working with the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) during the period Naipaul-Coolman was allegedly held captive and murdered.
Retired assistant police commissioner (ACP) Nadhir Khan, who led the investigation into Naipaul-Coolman’s kidnapping and eventual murder, also testified in the trial and confirmed that Fraser provided an alibi but admitted that it was not checked by his investigators.
Who’s in court
The ten men remaining on trial before Justice Malcolm Holdip are twin brothers Shervon and Devon Peters, siblings Keida and Jamille Garcia and their older brother Anthony Dwayne Gloster, brothers Marlon and Earl Trimmingham, Ronald Armstrong, Antonio Charles and Lyndon James. A 13th man, Raphael Williams, was charged with the crime but died in prison in 2011 of complications from sickle-cell anaemia. The trial began with 12 accused men, but Allan "Scanny" Martin was shot dead by police after staging a daring prison break from the Port-of-Spain State Prison at Frederick Street last July.