CoP upset over leaked CCTV footage in Angelo’s disappearance

Stephon Nicholas

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Al­lis­ter Gue­var­ro says the leak of cru­cial ev­i­dence in the dis­ap­pear­ance of two-year-old An­ge­lo To­bias-Plaza led cops on a “wild goose chase” in To­ba­go.

An­ge­lo was re­port­ed miss­ing from his Cam­bridge Trace, Good­wood home around 7.30 pm on May 11, trig­ger­ing a mul­ti-agency re­sponse cov­er­ing land and sea. To­day mark 11 days since the search for the child be­gan.

Speak­ing at a me­dia con­fer­ence at the Po­lice Ad­min­is­tra­tion Build­ing, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, Gue­var­ro de­fend­ed his of­fi­cers from crit­i­cism over their ap­proach to the in­ves­ti­ga­tion. He said the po­lice were ini­tial­ly re­spond­ing to a re­port of a miss­ing per­son and a body spot­ted in the sea.

“We were look­ing for a miss­ing child. The vil­lagers were look­ing for a miss­ing child,” he said.

Re­spond­ing to feed­back from peo­ple who felt the po­lice took too long to act in de­tain­ing and in­ter­ro­gat­ing per­sons of in­ter­est, he said of­fi­cers act­ed hu­mane­ly when the ini­tial re­port was re­ceived.

“At that point, we had no idea of sus­pi­cion of foul play,” he stat­ed.

The com­mis­sion­er said as new ev­i­dence was un­earthed, the in­ves­ti­ga­tion went in a dif­fer­ent di­rec­tion. He said po­lice were al­ready in pos­ses­sion of key CCTV footage and were analysing it when it was al­so shared with a me­dia per­son­al­i­ty.

He said, “That re­lease of that crit­i­cal CCTV footage ef­fec­tive­ly com­pro­mised this in­ves­ti­ga­tion and led to the po­lice get­ting a myr­i­ad of calls and what we call false leads, which em­anat­ed from spec­u­la­tion rather than from any ev­i­den­tiary po­si­tion. And it caused the search ef­forts to di­vert crit­i­cal re­sources from the in­ves­ti­ga­tion and from the search to what we would call a wild goose chase all over the place.”

Seiz­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ed­u­cate the pub­lic on just how dam­ag­ing such ac­tions can be, the CoP ad­vised, “When you share ev­i­dence with the po­lice and you lat­er turn around and share that ev­i­dence with per­sons on so­cial me­dia, whose goal is not jour­nal­ism but rather sen­sa­tion­al­ism, you ef­fec­tive­ly com­pro­mise the po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tion.”

The top cop said a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion oc­curred in the mur­der of mu­nic­i­pal po­lice of­fi­cer Anus­ka Ever­s­ley, when false in­for­ma­tion was dis­sem­i­nat­ed in much the same man­ner.

He begged, “When you are look­ing to get what I will call click likes, please do not do it at the ex­pense of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion.”

He urged the me­dia to be “re­spon­si­ble in your writ­ing” on the case and crit­i­cised what he termed as “sen­sa­tion­al” cov­er­age that could be deemed as pre­tri­al pub­lic­i­ty

Mean­while, Gue­var­ro said the in­for­ma­tion about a sus­pect con­fess­ing to mur­der­ing the child did not come from of­fi­cial po­lice chan­nels.

How­ev­er, Guardian Me­dia was in­formed by a re­li­able To­ba­go po­lice source on Wednes­day morn­ing that there was a con­fes­sion by a male sus­pect.

De­spite not con­firm­ing the re­port of a con­fes­sion, Gue­var­ro ac­knowl­edged that the po­lice op­er­a­tions are now cen­tred on the re­cov­ery of An­ge­lo’s body near the coast­line.

He did not con­firm how he knew the child was dead.