Tonight an entire family from Giles Street in the Lake Independence Area is on prison remand ager police found a firearm in their house yesterday evening. But, as we reported, it wasn't during a routine search; police found the gun during the repass after the funeral for 17 year old murder victim Myron Smith. They arrested the entire grieving family: Myron's mother, sister, father, and brother. Today, they were all taken to court and remanded for possession of an unlicensed firearm and 13 rounds of ammunition. Now, we stress, there are two sides to this story, but we start with the police account:
Sergeant Ismael Westby - Crimes Investigation Branch
"This is an incident where police were on normal routine patrol sometime around 5:25pm on the 7th July, 2014, and they saw a person running off the street into an open yard and went upstairs to a wooden house and police pursued the person. The person was found hiding inside a bathroom. As a result police conducted a search in that house where they discovered a 9mm pistol and it is not license and everybody who was inside that house were detained, arrested and charged with reference to that incident."
Monica Bodden
"Could you give us a figure of how many people?"
Sergeant Ismael Westby
"A total of 7 persons."
Reporter
"Were there any bullets found?"
Sergeant Ismael Westby
"There was a magazine containing 12 live ammunitions and one within the chamber."
And while that's what police say, the family says that there was no gun in the house; they say that police chased a young man up into the house - and that he brought the gun into the house.
But, the gun laws being what they are, the whole family remains on remand tonight.
That includes seven persons, two of them minors, who were arraigned today before Senior Magistrate Sharon Fraser on charges of keeping a firearm and keeping ammunition without a gun license. They are 52 year old Alrick Smith, 47 year old Sandra Casey, 22 year old Leon Smith, 19 year old Tamika Smith, 20 year old Rashida Brooks and two boys, their ages 17 and 16.
They pled not guilty to the charges and they were remanded into custody until August 21.
We are told the 17 year old tried to please guilty but he was cautioned by the judge that it still would not result in the release of the other suspects, so he didn't plea after all.
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