Kaia Sealy granted $700k bail

Ka­ia Sealy has been grant­ed $700,000 bail up­on mak­ing her first court ap­pear­ance hours af­ter re­turn­ing to Trinidad from the Unit­ed States, this morn­ing.

Sealy, a hair styl­ist from Mendez Dri­ve, Champ Fleurs, was grant­ed bail when she ap­peared be­fore High Court Mas­ter Nazeera Ali from the Tu­na­puna Po­lice Sta­tion, a short while ago.

Dressed in a grey hood­ie, Sealy sat silent­ly throught the hear­ing which last­ed a lit­tle over an hour.

She was on­ly asked to con­firm her con­di­tion.

“I am okay. I would have to have my catheter re­moved by a doc­tor or nurse,” Sealy said.

Dur­ing the hear­ing, Mas­ter Ali read eight crim­i­nal charges Sealy is ac­cused of that arose from a con­tro­ver­sial po­lice-in­volved shoot­ing at cor­ner of Col­lege Road and Bassie Street Ex­ten­sion, St Au­gus­tine on Jan­u­ary 20.

She was charged with un­law­ful­ly killing her part­ner Joshua Sama­roo (manslaugh­ter); shoot­ing at po­lice of­fi­cers Quin­cy Si­mon, Dar­ryl Bartholomew, and Gary Dun­can with in­tent to cause them gre­vi­ous bod­i­ly harm; pos­ses­sion of a Glock pis­tol and two rounds of am­mu­ni­tion; pos­ses­sion of a firearm with in­tent to en­dan­ger life; and dis­charg­ing a firearm with­in 40 me­tres of a pub­lic road.

Sealy was not called up­on to plead to the charges, which were laid in­dictably.

Po­lice pros­e­cu­tor An­tho­ny Ja­cob did not ob­ject to bail for Sealy based on her hav­ing a clean crim­i­nal record be­fore be­ing charged in re­la­tion to the in­ci­dent.

He al­so con­sid­ered sub­mis­sions from Sealy’s lawyers Lar­ry Williams, and Fay­ola Sandy, who said that their client had to re­turn to the US pe­ri­od­i­cal­ly to con­tin­ue treat­ment and re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion for in­juries she sus­tained in the in­ci­dent, which left her as a para­palegic.

In grant­i­ng Sealy bail, Mas­ter Ali di­rect­ed that she pro­vide the court and the po­lice with de­tails of her trav­el ar­ran­age­ments a week be­fore she plans to leave Trinidad to re­turn to Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts, to con­tin­ue her treat­ment in­clud­ing be­ing fit­ted for a cus­tom wheel­chair.

She al­so set dead­lines for the fil­ing of ev­i­dence and wit­ness state­ments against Sealy and set her suf­f­i­cen­cy hear­ing for Oc­to­ber 22.

At the start of the hear­ing, Williams raised con­cerns over how Sealy was treat­ed up­on her re­turn to Trinidad.

He said that while the po­lice had agreed that she would be al­lowed to be ex­am­ined by a doc­tor be­fore sur­ren­der­ing to po­lice, she was in­stead ar­rest­ed at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port and tak­en to the Arou­ca Po­lice Sta­tion.

He said that she was placed in an un­san­i­tary cell de­spite con­cerns raised over her med­ical con­di­tion.

“They (the po­lice) did not even have hand san­i­tiz­er,” Williams said.

Ja­cob apol­o­gised as he claimed that the plan had to be changed as se­nior po­lice of­fi­cers stat­ed that the sum­mons un­der which she was no­ti­fied of the charges was not served with­in the re­quired time as she was abroad.

Asked to dis­close a sum­ma­ry of the ev­i­dence against Sealy, Ja­cob stat­ed that the State would be re­ly­ing on 30 wit­ness­es and ex­i­hibits in­clud­ing a gun, two rounds of am­mu­ni­tion and three spent shells that were al­leged­ly found in the cou­ple’s car af­ter the shoot­ing.

He re­quest­ed a month for the case file to be trans­ferred to the Of­fice of the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions (DPP) for a State pros­e­cu­tor to be as­signed.