He has been missing since December 22nd. And today the worst was confirmed when police found the body of Police Constable Morris Martinez.
Just before 2:00 pm, a search team that had been scouring the area for the past week came across his badly decomposed body in a bushy area off a feeder road near a cane field on the Consejo road. This is to the northern end of Corozal town, a fair distance north of where his female companion told police they were robbed and assaulted on the night of December 22nd. Due to the advanced state of decomposition, a post mortem was scheduled to be conducted on site. So far police have arrested three men for robbing him. They are 33-year-old Elio Lopez, 29-year-old Apolonio Cervera and 26-year-old Edmund Crawford Sanker Jr., all residents of villages in the Corozal district.
While they are under remand, and can now expect those charges to be upgraded to murder, police believe that they were part of a wider ring and investigators are still aggressively seeking suspects. As for Constable Martinez, the 16 year veteran of the department is now confirmed as the third police officer to be killed in the 4 weeks between November 26th and December 24th the worst spate of cop killing ever recorded in Belize.
