Today we learned that the death of Senior Superintendent of Police Dathan Henry o/c Duffy was ruled a homicide, as a result of poisoning.
At the time of his death I opined that it was shameful that Henry spent days in the Hospital before he died, although I’m not a Doctor I concluded that the evidence seemed to suggest that despite complaining about stomach pains, Doctors at the Kingston Public hospital was unable to even diagnose what was the cause of his aliment.
I thought that Senior Superintendent Henry’s family and the Agency he served may have dropped the ball in not treating his ailment with the due dispatch it deserved. Clearly between the time he started complaining that he was feeling ill, and to the best of my recollection, having serious stomach cramps, and the time he died, any competent Doctor could have theorized that he may have been poisoned.
That level of diagnostic competence was certainly not going to come from that facility however, so essentially Dathan Henry died for want of competent medical help
The Kingston Public Hospital is one of the most poorly run filthy facility that could ever be called a medical facility.
It has always been and under the present leadership of both political parties , probably will be forever. I mean that place is so bad I refused treatment there though I was shot and bleeding in 1987. The horror stories associated with that facility are too many to mention. As numerous and horrendous as those stories are they really are not the focus of this article.
Duffy Henry laid in that facility for days un-diagnosed, and ended up ( dead fi wants) Jamaican vernacular for dying for lack of of proper assistance.
The focus of my arguments however is on the investigations surrounding this now declared homicide. From the offset I commented in these blogs that despite the lack of conclusion in the first reports, the Police still had a job to do in running a full investigation, focused as a homicide investigation, until the evidence or lack of it determines otherwise.
SSP Cornwall (bigga) Ford i/c Flying Squad.
The report shows that at the time of his death, the senior superintendent had the substance Warfarin in his body.
Checks with online medical references show that Warfarin is used to prevent the blood from clotting, so that it takes longer than usual for someone to stop bleeding if they have a cut or is injured.(jamaicagleaner.com)
The Gleaner reports that head of the (MIT) Superintendent Michael Phipps, was tight-lipped about the report. This would be laughable if it wasn’t serious. Having spent 10 years in the JCF and 5 of them at the CIB I have seen my share of tight lipped investigations. In fact the so-called big-wigs were so clueless they had no option but to be tight-lipped, in fact if they dared open their mouths they would have stuck their feet down their own throats.
Next Sunday March 10th the Jamaica Observer will feature a story detailing the death of former Wailers drummer Carlton Barrett, Barrett was gunned down at his gate as he returned from Ligunea with Jerk Chicken for his family. The story if detailed correctly will show how investigations revealed that Barrett was set up by his own wife , the very wife he went to get jerk chicken for that weekend evening.
The report will most certainly tell how Police Detectives cracked the case with good old-fashioned detective work.
What that report will certainly not tell you is that case was solved because a young gung-ho cop just recently assigned at CIB walked into the CIB office at Constant Spring that morning and picked up the phone as it rang. On the phone was a woman who identified herself as the wife of the murdered Barrrett, she wanted to know how far the Police had reached in their investigations.
That fateful telephone call never left the mind of that young cop as he watched the big-wigs running around chasing after supposed leads like a dog chasing it’s tail, to no avail.
After going back to his boss, the then Detective Inspector Noël Asphall, the young cop finally got him to listen to his suspicion about that telephone call. What woman who just lost her husband overnight in such a fashion would be calling the police the morning after wanting to know where they were in their investigations< unless she had something to worry about of course?
That young cop was me, that was what cracked that case wide open. There will be no mention of my name when the Article is written. The truth is these guys could not investigate a loud music report if it was in their front yards.
Dathan Henry was a young constable in that CIB office,he is now dead. Retired Superintendent Anthony Hewitt was gunned down in broad daylight , no one has been held accountable. Retired Superintendent Denzil Boyd was murdered just over a week ago, to date no one has been held accountable.
No life is more important than the other but , more than 3 Jamaicans are slaughtered daily in a country of 3.6 million, how can there be confidence on the part of the public ‚if the Police can’t even solve murders of their highest ranking officers?
The Jamaica Constabulary Force must bring the killers of these three public servants to justice, not bring justice to them. The Police has made the task of policing much more difficult, through corruption, incompetence, nepotism, and a whole host of other vices they ought not be involved in.
They are facing irrelevance, policing is a lot more than guns and brute force.