Ford: Duhaney shot thrice, died on spot - Mom relieved long autopsy wait over
Published:Thursday | July 2, 2020 | 12:19 AMNadine Wilson-Harris/Staff Reporter
The family of 24-year-old Javane Duhaney is now breathing a sigh of relief after an autopsy was completed yesterday, nearly two months after he was shot dead in Kingston.
The procedure, which was originally scheduled to be carried out last week, had been postponed over a disagreement.
“I am so happy that I finally get him,” Duhaney’s mother, Yanike Crosdale, said yesterday, adding that she could now finally proceed with funeral plans. “[I’m going to] lay him to rest and then me and the Government talk after.”
Relatives and friends comforted Crosdale yesterday as she wept while awaiting initial news of the findings of the autopsy at the funeral home.
Duhaney, a resident of Bray Street, along Elletson Road in Kingston, was reportedly shot by a soldier on May 9 as he sat on his verandah, eating a bun and cheese and sausage.
Yesterday’s autopsy was conducted by senior forensic examiner Dr Humberto Casanova and was observed by officers from the Independent Commission of Investigations, along with Dr Jephthah Ford, the family’s independent observer.
Ford said that during the procedure, it was discovered that Duhaney had been shot three times, and the shots were “fired so closely together that to an uninformed bystander, it would appear to be one shot”.
He added: “We recovered flour residue at the back of his throat, which means that he was eating at the time that he was shot.”
The medical doctor concluded that Duhaney, a security officer, died on the spot and that it appeared that the bullets came from a single weapon fired at “great speed”.
The autopsy took more than two hours to complete as there were some challenges locating the bullets.
“It emphasises the point that it is time that the Government gets an X-ray machine that we can X-ray these bodies when they are shot so we can know exactly where bullets are,” Ford said.
When contacted, executive director of the Institute of Forensic Science and Legal Medicine, Judith Henry-Mowatt, declined to comment on the findings of the autopsy, saying that she had not yet spoken with the forensic pathologist.
She could not say whether Ford’s findings were solely his own conclusions or whether they were mutual findings between him and Casanova.