Deported ex-cop held at airport
Published:Friday | August 26, 2011 | 12:00 AM
Glenroy Sinclair, Assignment Coordinator
Immediately after he arrived on a charter flight with 70 other deportees, at the Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston yesterday, an ex-policeman who was on the run for eight years was greeted by some of his former colleagues who escorted him off to the Kingston Central Police Complex.
"We handcuffed him before he got off the flight," an investigator attached to the Bureau of Special Investigations (BSI) told The Gleaner yesterday.
Forty-six-year-old Walter Spikes has been charged with the murder of nine-year-old Renée Lyons, whose life was snuffed out on July 2, 2003. It is alleged that the bullet which killed her was fired from the private firearm of Spikes, who was then a police constable attached to the St Andrew South Police Division.
"He is going before the court on Tuesday," head of the BSI, Assistant Commissioner Granville Gause, disclosed yesterday.
Clad in a heavy sweat top and dark-coloured jeans, Spikes was interrogated for an extensive period yesterday.
"He said even though it has been eight years, he is still traumatised by the incident," said Gause.
The Gleaner understands that the former police constable has been incarcerated in the United States since November 29, 2009. The BSI got wind of the information through Interpol.
It is alleged that after the shooting incident which occurred in the vicinity of the Portia Simpson Miller Square in St Andrew, Spikes fled the island before the DPP made the ruling in December 2003.
It is alleged that Spikes and his colleagues at the time were responding to a robbery when one of the accused fired at the police. The police responded and the child was shot in the head.