Crown: Ex liquor store worker was getaway driver

(CNS): Crown counsel Garcia Kelly told a jury on Thursday that Kasnique Cupid acted as the getaway driver in a conspiracy with two other men to rob her former employer, Tortuga Liquors, in February 2020. Richard Edward Nash, her co-accused in the robbery of the Governor’s Square liquor store, and another unidentified man fled with less than $3,000 dollars after assaulting and terrorizing the two women working in the store on the evening of the stick-up, the crown said. The police tracked the getaway van, which was caught on CCTV, to Cupid and connected her to Nash through phone records.

As the trial opened last week, Kelly told the jury that the case against the defendants is based on circumstantial evidence. But he said the crown would show that when all of the strands of evidence were pulled together, they would be sure beyond reasonable doubt that Nash was one of the actual robbers and that Cupid had helped organise the crime and had assisted the men to get to the scene of the crime and then make their escape.

The robbery took place on Friday, 7 February 2020, at around 8:40pm. When she took the witness stand, the store leader told the court that she had just exited the store room and was walking with her back to the door of the shop when she heard the door ring, indicating that a customer was entering. Suddenly she was pushed in the back and forced on to the ground. A man told her, “Get down!” and she could see he had a knife.

In emotional testimony, she told the court she was really scared during the ordeal, which included hearing her co-worker assaulted and the robbers demanding cash from the till. The robbers then dragged both women into the store room and ordered them to open the safe shouting, “Where’s the money? Where’s the money?” But there was only empty money pouches and gift cards in the safe, so the robbers fled with the cash they had taken from the cash register.

The shop leader said she then instinctively picked up the mop her co-worker had been using to clean the floor and headed for the exit after the robbers. She yelled out into Governor’s Square that the store had been robbed, and as she saw the men fleeing on foot across the road, she threw the mop at them. Some people coming from Cost-U-Less also saw the robbers running across the road, heading south, and police believe they ran to the white van being driven by Cupid.

The Tortuga store leader told the court that she went back inside, locked the door and called the police. Officers quickly viewed available CCTV and saw the robbers arrive in a white van, which then left the location and parked in a side road by Sunshine Suites. It took the police a few days to track the registered owner of the getaway vehicle and tie it to Cupid. But since her arrest, she has denied driving the van that night except for a shopping trip to Foster’s Republix in West Bay.

But with the help of CCTV and phone records, the police tracked the van before, during and after the robbery that night. According to prosecutors, Cupid was seen at Foster’s, where she purchased a pair of dark gloves, just like those worn by the robbers, using a Needs Assessment Unit card registered to her husband. Kelly told the court that when she returned to the van, she drove out of the Foster’s parking lot towards Cemetery Beach and the Esterley Tibbetts Highway, and not, as she has claimed, to her home in West Bay.

The police picked up the van on other CCTV footage as it drove towards the crime scene, then at Governor’s Square and then driving towards Sunshine Suites. After the robbery the van was again spotted on CCTV parked for some time at Governor’s Beach. Phone records show that both Cupid and Nash’s phones were in the Seven Mile Beach area at the same time that the van was parked, police said. During that time Cupid made a call to a friend, who gave evidence that she was asked to call a number and tell the man who answered to call Cupid.

Police later tied both that number and Cupid’s number to Nash. As a result, the police secured a search warrant for his home and found the exact clothes worn by one of the robbers, as seen on CCTV. And although he denied that he knew Cupid, the police found her number in his phone. The jury heard he was then arrested and later charged with the robbery.

The case continues.