Murder accused told police he only wanted to frighten victim

Murder accused Akyem Tafari Wharton allegedly told police back in 2011 that he did not go to Simon Cherubin’s house to kill him, only to “frighten him”.

Station Sergeant Deric Griffith attributed those oral statements to Wharton when he took the witness stand before a 12-member jury and Justice Randall Worrell in the No. 2 Supreme Court.

Wharton, of Sobers Lane, St Michael, is accused of murdering Cherubin on January 27, 2011.

On his first occasion on the stand, Station Sergeant Griffith told the court that before he questioned the accused, he told him of his right to an attorney.

“My lawyer knows I am in the police station and is coming to see me. I don’t want my lawyer to talk to you though, I will talk to you now,” he said Wharton replied.

The officer said he then informed Wharton of the probe into the incident in which Cherubin was chopped about his body by a man armed with a sword, while at his residence on January 1, 2011, and he died at the QEH on January 27 as a result of injuries sustained during that attack.

Wharton reportedly replied: “I
did not go there to kill [him] I went there to frighten him. If I wanted to kill him, I would have killed him in the house. Things get out of hand, [he] made a grab for my sword and I know if he got it he would chop me. That is when I chop him a couple of times with my sword.”

The accused man’s attorney, Angella Mitchell-Gittens objected to all the oral statements the officer attributed to her client on the grounds that they were “never made”.

Submissions were subsequently heard in the absence of the jury and after a ruling by the judge, Griffith continued his evidence on Monday.

He said he had asked the accused why he had gone to Cherubin’s house. Wharton, he said, responded by saying that he and Cherubin were involved in a scene at “a street jam pun the Gaza block”. 

“He wanted to hit me with a bottle. The whole thing was foolish. It started before that. For a long time now, every time he see me he use to run talk pun me. At the street jam, I had brandy on the ground and he kick it down on purpose. I thought he did it on purpose because he did not apologise or nothing. He just start to quarrel and wanted to fight. It was foolish; he could have apologised and move. This whole thing dun my life, with running from the police and thing. I tried to get in Canada,” he told police.

The police witness told the court that Wharton asked to speak to his attorney when asked for a written statement and following that conversation, he declined to say anything more.

“Officer, I told my lawyer what I told you earlier and she told me not to answer any more questions and do not give any statement, no matter what. I don’t have anything more to say,” he reportedly said, and gave “nothing to say” replies to all subsequent questions, including a request to point out Cherubin’s house and the identity of a second man who was with him.

Under cross-examination, the officer was asked why he didn’t ask the accused to sign his police notebook when the question segment of the interview had come to end. 

The officer said he didn’t think
it was “prudent” or “appropriate” to question the accused any further before the attorney arrived.

However, Mitchell-Gittens suggested to the officer that he had “concocted” the orals he said her client had made. 

“The oral statements were made, Your Honour,” he replied.

Also giving evidence on Monday was Dr Corinthia Dupuis, a pathologist at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital who conducted the autopsy on January 28, 2011, on the body of 38-year-old Cherubin of 8th Avenue New Orleans, St Michael.

“Death, in my opinion, was due to internal hemorrhage, secondary to disseminated intravascular coagulation; secondary to sepsis rising in a setting of multiple slash wounds,” the doctor testified.

She explained that disseminated intravascular coagulation occurs when the body has used up multiple clotting factors. 

“The body is no longer able to clot and so there is massive hemorrhage that
happens internally. It can occur in a setting of multiple blood transfusions, it can also occur from generalised sepsis or infection,”
she said.