Police shooting survivor on long road to recovery

Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­[email protected]

In­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to the po­lice-in­volved shoot­ing that led to the death of Joshua Sama­roo and the wound­ing of his com­mon-law wife Ka­ia Sealy are still un­der­way, even as Sealy con­tin­ues a long re­cov­ery process fol­low­ing the shoot­ing.

This was re­vealed by mem­bers of their fam­i­lies and friends yes­ter­day, as they con­tin­ued what has been a se­ries of protests call­ing for jus­tice in the mat­ter, this time out­side the Four Roads Po­lice Sta­tion in Diego Mar­tin.

Sama­roo was shot and killed by po­lice af­ter a pur­port­ed shootout in St Au­gus­tine on Jan­u­ary 20. Se­cu­ri­ty cam­era footage of the in­ci­dent was shared on so­cial me­dia, prompt­ing wide­spread out­rage and calls for greater po­lice over­sight af­ter it con­tra­dict­ed the sto­ry the po­lice ini­tial­ly gave about how the in­ci­dent played it­self out.

Yes­ter­day, Alyssa Phillip, an ac­tivist and close friend of Sealy, said Sealy was re­cov­er­ing and had be­gun phys­io­ther­a­py as part of the re­cu­per­a­tion process from gun­shot wounds sus­tained dur­ing the at­tack. How­ev­er, Phillip said Sealy had not pro­vid­ed po­lice with any fur­ther state­ments fol­low­ing the in­ci­dent in Jan­u­ary.

Dur­ing yes­ter­day’s protest, Phillip and the protest­ing group again called for greater ac­count­abil­i­ty on the part of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice.

Phillip said this was the eighth po­lice sta­tion she and oth­er demon­stra­tors had vis­it­ed dur­ing their protest ac­tion.

She said while videos of the protest usu­al­ly gen­er­at­ed sig­nif­i­cant so­cial me­dia en­gage­ments, peo­ple were less in­clined to par­tic­i­pate in-per­son.

She al­so urged the pub­lic to take a greater in­ter­est in such mat­ters, as it can al­so af­fect them.

“Peo­ple in the past stood up for a change and that’s why things are bet­ter to­day, so for us to do noth­ing now will trick­le down to fu­ture gen­er­a­tions,” she said.

“If I have kids, I need to have them in a so­ci­ety that is safe. There’s sup­posed to be a vast dif­fer­ence be­tween crim­i­nals and po­lice of­fi­cers and the lines have been blurred.”

She al­so called on Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Al­lis­ter Gue­var­ro to be more trans­par­ent in the in­ves­tiga­tive process, as she con­tend­ed that sim­ply re­port­ing that the in­ves­ti­ga­tion was al­most com­plete did not of­fer any re­al re­as­sur­ance to peo­ple dis­trust­ful of the au­thor­i­ties.

“My ques­tion to the com­mis­sion­er is what type of man you want to be re­mem­bered as, be­cause right now it’s not look­ing good. You are still feed­ing us bread­crumbs by telling us the in­ves­ti­ga­tion is al­most com­plete. We want to see and know what’s go­ing on.”

One of the demon­stra­tors out­side the sta­tion was Nicole Richards, the moth­er of Fabi­an Richards, who was one of three peo­ple killed by po­lice dur­ing a pur­port­ed shootout in down­town Port-of-Spain in Ju­ly 2022.

Richards told Guardian Me­dia that see­ing the footage of the shoot­ing in­volv­ing Sama­roo and Sealy brought back mem­o­ries of her son’s killing. She lament­ed that af­ter four years, she has re­ceived no up­date on the state of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to his killing.

“The in­ves­ti­ga­tor, Mr Neil Bran­don John, has died. How­ev­er, we haven’t got­ten any an­swer as yet. How­ev­er, the of­fi­cers who did the killing are on desk du­ty.

“Why, is it be­cause we’re from the ghet­to we can’t get jus­tice as yet? It was very hurt­ful be­cause we went through the same thing.”

Richards was un­able to an­swer fur­ther ques­tions af­ter this state­ment, as she be­came too emo­tion­al and had to be con­soled by fel­low pro­test­ers.

The demon­stra­tion was mon­i­tored close­ly by of­fi­cers of the Four Roads sta­tion, some of whom were seen record­ing the ac­tiv­i­ties.

Sev­er­al dri­vers on the West­ern Main Road cheered and honked their horns in sup­port of the group dur­ing the af­ter­noon.