Four prison officers charged over escape of `Smallie’
-two other persons remanded
Superintendent of the Mazaruni Prison, Alexander Hopkinson is among six persons who were charged yesterday with conspiring to facilitate the escape on Friday of death row prisoner Royden Williams known as `Smallie’.
The others charged are Rajmohan Autor known as `Chico’, 48, a businessman of Parika Outfall; Frangeliz Jugandry Flores Perez, 28, a Venezuelan of Alexander Street, Kitty; Omar Witherspoon, a prison officer of Stanleytown, New Amsterdam; Conroy Hosannah, a prison officer of Fort Ordnance Housing Scheme, East Canje; Oldfield Romulus, 50, a prison officer of Cumberland Village, East Canje.
They appeared at the Bartica Magistrate’s Court before Magistrate Crystal Lambert and were all remanded until June 22nd. The charges would be seen as a major blow to the integrity of the prison service at the high security facility at Mazaruni and add to a long list of cases where serious corruption charges have been levelled against members of the Joint Services.
Williams who has been convicted of multiple murders – including from the 2008 Bartica Massacre – and sentenced to death would have been one of the highest-value prisoners in the system. Yet on Friday, he easily fled the Mazaruni prison in what was an elaborate plot that saw a visit from a woman in flagrant breach of protocols surrounding death row prisoners followed by a fusillade from a rifleman who had disembarked from a boat that had staked out the area the night before. Supposedly with leg chains, Williams and his accomplice ran and jumped into the river while covering fire was laid by another rifleman aboard the boat. They then motored away from the prison and haven’t been seen since.
The Joint Services have searched the Mazaruni and other areas but have embarrassingly seen no sigh of Williams. At last word, Williams and his two accomplices were sporting high-powered rifles.
Back in 2022, ‘Smallie’ was sentenced to death for the 2008 murder of Guyana Defence Force (GDF) officer Ivor Williams.
Sherwin Nero also known as ‘Catty’, had also been charged and later he confessed to killing Williams and was released from prison after he pleaded guilty to a lesser count of manslaughter and was sentenced for time already served back in 2020.
Nero and ‘Smallie’ were jointly charged for the offence and Nero was freed based on time spent on remand since June 2008.
Reports are that around 8:30 pm on the day in question several armed men ambushed a GDF vehicle returning to Camp Ayanganna from an administrative run in Berbice.
The gunmen engaged the soldiers on the Railway Embankment Road between Church of God and Company roads, during which Williams was fatally shot and two others, a soldier and a Friendship
woman, were injured.
In 2017, ‘Smallie’ along with his co-accused Dennis Williams, called ‘Anaconda’, were both sentenced to death after they were found guilty of storming Bartica, where 12 men, including three police officers, were killed during an almost hour-long assault. Those killed in the rampage were police officers Lance Corporal Zaheer Zakir, and Constables Shane Fredericks and Ron Osborne, and civilians Edwin Gilkes, Dexter Adrian, Irving Ferreira,
Deonarine Singh, Ronald Gomes, Ashraf Khan, Abdool Yasseen, Errol Thomas, and Baldeo Singh.
‘Smallie’ and company had appealed the sentence but months after, ‘Smallie’ was among the group of high-profile prisoners who escaped after a fire gutted the Camp Street Prison in Georgetown.
He was however apprehended weeks later by police while riding a public minibus on the Weldaad Public Road, West Coast Berbice.
‘Smallie’ was said to be
the mastermind in setting up the entire incident.
In 2021, a jury found ‘Smallie’ not guilty of the December 16, 2007 murders of 35-year-old Rajesh Singh and 25-year-old Fazal Hakim, at Triumph, ECD.