And the four officers, who are currently detained, claim that they were fired upon first, and that's why they were shooting back. But, as you heard, the young men involved and their family say differently. Of course, it would have been easier to say who's telling the truth if the body cam attached to one of the officers was actually on, but according to Superintendent Gerald Jones of the NCIB, it was turned off - which is a breach of their internal policy.
But before we get to that, Superintendent Jones explained that they canvassed the scene and found two different kinds of bullets.
Supt. Gerald Jones, Deputy Head, NCIB
"In respect to the entire investigation, a team of officers led by myself as well as Major Crime Unit in Belmopan left en route to Orange Walk to conduct investigation. We canvassed the entire scene of the incident from where it started to the end and we have found ten.223 expended shells, eight of them were found within the vicinity of Liberty and Palmar area and two were found within the supermarket area. Alongside on the route, two.9mm expended shells were also found. Police then requested assistance with the scenes of crime, they processed the scene and packaged those extended shells. Four police officers were detained pending the outcome of this investigation."
"The rifles we have that we have that were signed out by the police officers have since been seized packaged and will be sent to the lab for testing."
"The body cam that the police officers were using at that time, we found out that they had the body cam on their body but it was not turned on and so we need to conduct a further investigation to find out if there was any breach in terms of this situation."
But while the officers say they didn't have a 9mm pistol, the ComPol isn't buying that just yet. He refrained from corroborating the cops' story, and instead explained that they are looking at the angle that the sound from the victim's motorcycle backfiring could have been mistaken for gunshots.
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"The.223 expended shells are likely those discharged by the police. The investigations based on the interviews conducted with the police officers, they are saying neither of them had a 9mm pistol. We're not going to say at this stage without having sufficient proof that the officers were indeed fired upon. We still need to ascertain where exactly those two 9mm expended shells came from and to help us with that aspect of the investigation, we are going to submit those shells to the National Forensic Service Ballistic Unit and they will be able to do the analysis to ascertain if in fact those expended shells were fired by any police weapons as well as if it was discharged by any license weapons because you would know that the forensic lab, the ballistic unit do have fingerprints of every licensed firearm as well as every police issued weapon. Once we issue a weapon to police officers for use, we normally ensure it is test fired and the expended shell goes to the lab so that they can keep a record of our weapons in their database system."
"The investigators have interviewed a number of persons and recorded statements from them but other than the police officers, no one else is saying that they heard any shots fired at the police or they saw anyone firing at the police. We have not come to that as yet so for now, we are operating under the perception that it could be that as the young men have said that the motorcycle that they were on had the muffler removed and because of the removal of the muffler it makes a lot of noise, when you gear down, it will make a backfire sound and as a part of their investigation, I had directed this morning that Mr Jones take the motorcycle to a mechanic to verify if in fact the motorcycles would be capable of making such noise. That was done, the mechanic do confirm that the motorcycle do in fact make those noise so we're still in limbo where they is concerned."
