‘Shineka Gray was a human sacrifice’ – prosecution
‘Shineka Gray may have been 15 years old, but she tried to fight her attacker that night. That’s how life is even if you know you can’t win. She was crying, ‘Lord is this what you’re going to do to your daughter?’ but she fought.’
“THE CROWN is confident Shineka Gray was a human sacrifice.”
That was the unsettling declaration made in the St James Circuit Court yesterday by lead prosecutor Andrea Martin-Swaby while delivering the prosecution’s closing arguments in the trial of Gregory Roberts, who is accused of the 2017 murder of the 15-year-old schoolgirl.
The proclamation was in reference to the repeated use of the word ‘sacrifice’ since Roberts’ trial began on November 23, 2023.
The term has been particularly referenced in relation to testimony from earlier in the trial about text messages relating to money Roberts reportedly accused his ex-girlfriend of conning from him.
Speaking with the impassioned tone of a church preacher, Martin-Swaby urged the trial’s seven-member jury to convict Roberts for Gray’s murder based on the evidence that has been presented to date, which includes text messages attributed to Roberts i n the hours leading up to January 29, 2017, the day of Gray’s death.
“There was a human sacrifice in the Good Book. If you remember Isaiah, it says, ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him.’ Is it that Shineka was wounded for the transgressions of [ex-girlfriend]? Is it that she was bruised for the iniquities, that [ex-girlfriend] took $10,000 and did not give Gregory Roberts her vagina?” Martin-Swaby demanded, referencing t he specific reported accusation of the ex-girlfriend’s alleged conning of money from Roberts.
“At 11:47 that Sunday, he sent a text to [ex-girlfriend], and this is what the text said: ‘You going to see something you never see before, tomorrow, in Jamaica, and that’s when you going to say I am crazy.’ So [ex-girlfriend] does not give you sex, she takes your money, and because of that you are going to turn the parish of St James upside down in Jamaica,” Martin-Swaby intoned grimly, while Roberts occasionally whispered to his legal team, but otherwise sat calmly in the prisoner’s dock.
Martin-Swaby also pointed the jury to the post-mortem report, which indicated that Gray suffered 19 stab wounds to her neck, arms, and torso and drew reference to testimony from Mario Morrison, Roberts’ former co-defendant who testified to recording the killing of Gray using Roberts’ cellular phone on the night of January 29, 2017.
“I thought to myself, who kills someone and asks for it to be videoed? Why was it important for Gregory Roberts to kill and record it? Because – what did he say to Mario Morrison? – ‘dem take me fi fool and nuh know seh mi a killer’. So to prove a point, you had to show that ‘I am a bad man, and I will draw blood’,” said Martin-Swaby.
“Shineka Gray may have been 15 years old, but she tried to fight her attacker that night. That’s how life is even if you know you can’t win. She was crying, ‘Lord is this what you’re going to do to your daughter?’ but she fought,” Martin-Swaby said soberly.
The prosecution began its summation following the summary of the defence’s case by Roberts’ lead defence attorney Leroy Equiano, who sought to discredit Morrison’s testimony by presenting the former co-defendant as having self-serving motives.
“His friend (Roberts) picked him up, he (Morrison) went to the back of the car. he friend then picked up a lady, and this lady went to the front of the car. And then it gets even more interesting [ because] where they stopped, he gave us one story here. Then we realise the statement had something else,” Equiano told the jury regarding Morrison.
“He’s feeling for information because he doesn’t want to tell us something ... . Here is the ‘video man’ telling you, according to the Crown, that he was not focused on what was going on, he was just holding the camera,” Equiano added. “But this was the man who, in the night, was taken to a certain place where the body was found, according to him, and he was able to lead the police back to that place. This is the Crown’s witness, the ‘trash’ that the truck is carrying up the hill.”
Equiano also pointed to previous evidence by a forensic expert that DNA analysis found at the site where Gray’s body had been found failed to concretely identify or implicate Roberts.
The prosecution will continue the summation of its evidence tomorrow.
Gray, who was a grade 10 student of the Green Pond High School in St James at the time of her death, was found dead in the Irwin community on February 1, 2017, with multiple stab wounds, three days after she was last seen alive in Montego Bay.