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Three years later…Corporal Romain Cleto’s murder remains on the unsolved list
By Dale Andrews
The recent successes of the Guyana Police Force in solving violent crimes are a great source of encouragement for this small nation where gunmen at one time felt immune to capture.
Corporal Romain Cleto with his daughter shortly before his death.
What is even more encouraging in that some of the cases that are being solved go back as far as eight years.
But amidst the encouragement, there is some despair for the relatives of some victims of crime especially murder, who are still anxious to receive some amount of justice.
It is even more despairing when the victim of one of these unsolved crimes is from among those who are supposed to be solving them.
They say charity begins at home and this is so applicable when it comes to the Guyana Police Force pulling out all the stops to find the killers of Corporal Romain Cleto.
It’s been three years since this crime fighter was gunned down and to date his colleagues in the organization that is supposed to bring his family justice have not done so. It seems that this might be the case for many years to come.
Except for a grand memorial every year during the force’s anniversary celebrations, precious little seems to be done to truly satisfy Cleto’s grieving relatives, including his only daughter who was one year old at the time.
Incidentally, in their haste to satisfy the public, the police had charged a city resident, only for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to withdraw the matter, much to their embarrassment.
I have covered my fair share of policemen being killed but none of their deaths left the scar that corporal Romain Cleto’s death has left on my reporting career.
April 27 2013
An image from Cleto’s Facebook page which is still active today.
It was just after the sundown on April 27 2013; I was driving around with columnist Freddie Kissoon when we noticed a large crowd at the junction of Avenue of the Republic and Regent Street, in the vicinity of the Plaisance Minibus Park.
Our inquisitive nature caused us to stop and enquire. You could imagine our anxiety when we learnt that there had just been a shootout between the police and gunmen and that there might be some casualties.
I immediately asked myself, “How brazen could these people be? Right in the heart of downtown Georgetown, where so many people had gathered?”
We saw several spent 7.62 rounds and nine millimeter shell casings that littered the scene. The walls of the Bank of Baroda were riddled with bullet holes; the place resembled a war zone.
Everyone was talking about what they had witnessed a few minutes ago and I was certain that this would have been an easy matter for the police to investigate and eventually capture the perpetrators.
“Dem men just shoot up like if dey deh in a war,” one eyewitness stated at the scene.
It was later learnt that a policeman was killed and two others were injured. I was surprised that no mention was made of any of the gunmen or any other person being shot. It was if the policemen were the intended targets.
That night I was told that Cleto and his colleagues were on patrol when they spotted a suspicious looking silver-coloured car and trailed it with a view to engaging the occupants.
“The car had paper over the licence plate,” an eyewitness had told Kaieteur News. The eyewitness said when the car stopped at the traffic light at the junction of Regent Street and Avenue of the Republic, the police decided to approach the occupants.
Cleto, who was in charge of the patrol, came out of the police vehicle and approached the car not realizing the danger that was waiting for him.
Within seconds one of the occupants of the car began shooting, mortally wounding Cleto while spraying the police vehicle with bullets.
“While de corporal going to de car, de driver come out and start spraying bullets like he head ain’t good,” one source informed this newspaper.
There are reports that the driver of the police vehicle managed to return fire with his Beretta submachine, possibly wounding the gunman. The car then sped away north along Avenue of the Republic.
Two other policemen Anil Raj Persaud, 28, of Claybrick Road, Number Two Canal, was cut by flying glass, and Randy Haley, 20, of Mahaicony sustained gunshot injuries to his left hand.
What is interesting about this case being unsolved is the fact that Cleto was killed in full public view, where surveillance cameras abound yet to date the investigators are seemingly unable to identify the cop killers.
This is despite the fact that they received descriptions of at least one of the killers as well as the car that was used in the commission of the act.
Shortly after the shooting, the then head of operations of the Guyana police force had vowed that all stops would have been pulled out to bring Cleto’s killer to justice.
It was a premature consolation to the dead cop’s relatives and colleagues. Think about it, if this had happened in any other country, what do you think the response would have been?
The entire police force would have been hunting down the killers like vultures.
Wrong suspect
A few days later, under mounting public pressure the police arrested Shaka Chase and later charged him with Cleto’s murder. This was despite not seeking the advice of the DPP.
During custody Chase passionately proclaimed his innocence, which was supported by his convincing alibi.
Investigators had claimed that CCTV cameras along with an eyewitness had placed the suspect at the scene. Ironically, there were reports that the suspect had given the police a confession about the shooting.
They also relied heavily on a ‘confession’ purportedly obtained from a woman who subsequently revealed that she was tortured to sign a statement in which she identified Shaka Chase as one of the persons in the car that the killers were using at the time of the shooting.
The police had claimed in a statement that a laboratory report also indicated that the swab taken from Shaka Chase’s hands was positive for gunpowder residue.
Chase’s relatives had maintained that he was being targeted by the police. According to one relative, the suspect is normally “picked up” by the police and held for 72 hours without charge.
The relative maintains that when the shooting happened, the suspect was at a bar drinking.
The relative explained that it was the suspect who first went to the police station after his name was called. “He went to the station to clear his name and ended up being charged.”
The dead cop’s relatives were not amused when a Magistrate discharged the murder charge against Chase following the advice of the DPP.
The DPP had found several discrepancies in the police investigations, especially when it came to the identity of the killer.
An alleged eyewitness had described the shooter as a fair-skinned mixed race individual as against a dark-skinned man with dreadlocks.
There was also some concern over the swabbing of the suspects’ hands as reported by the police, who claimed that they found gunpowder residue.
“With all the discrepancies, the police cannot readily say for sure if the man they brought to court was at the scene of the shooting,” a source had informed.
Cleto’s father, David Kendall, was convinced that Cleto’s colleagues who were with him the night he was killed, still hold the key to the real identity of the killer(s). He had voiced this opinion hours after Chase was set free.
“Well, as far as I concern, the colleagues who was with him, his fellow policemen, they have something to say because they are alive. The driver is alive, the other guy who get hit, they have something to say,” Kendall had said.
“There are all sorts of reports. They finding, they beating, they picking up and they loosing, but I ain’t saying nothing,” the dead cop’s father said.
I recalled Kendall, who was present in court when Shaka Chase was set free, telling me that he was at a loss when the former murder accused walked out of the courtroom.
“What I observed going on there this morning at the court, I just break out… like I didn’t know which part of Georgetown I was walking but I walking, heading home,” he explained.
Lillian Cleto, the late cop’s mother, had shared the same view as her husband with regards to her late son’s colleagues.
“Yes, the people who were with him, they supposed to say is which person or they supposed to see something…somebody, but nobody ain’t saying anything. We want justice,” she declared.
The couple said that they have not been able to speak to any of Cleto’s colleagues to find out what happened during the last minutes of their son’s life.
For Lillian Cleto, she wants the police to find the real killers; but she would not like to see an innocent man pay for the murder of her son.
“I would like to know that they get the right person, the right killer,” she had said.
Of course today, the police could only give the usual update, “The matter is still under investigation”.
For the past week I tried contacting Cleto’s relatives but was unsuccessful.
However, I could not help noticing the memorials on his facebook page which is still active to this day.
The anniversary of his death was greeted with many RIPs from his friends and former colleagues, who I’m sure would all like to see there is some form of justice even “three years later…”
At the time of his death, Romain Cleto was 25 years old. He hailed from the North West District, and was assured of a great career in the Guyana Police Force.
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They arrested someone whose description was far different than the one of the suspect provided by witnesses, and beat a confession out of him. So it is no surprise that to date this is not one of the cases that is attracting the attention of Law Enforcement. There are hundreds of murders that remain unsolvable not because of lack of evidence, but because of the teflon protection that is in place for the killers and those who give them orders.