Murder suspect turns down chance to tell his side

(CNS): After two weeks of hearing the crown’s evidence against him for the murder of his 24-year-old son, Shaquille Demario Bush, in November 2019, Roger Deward Bush (47) declined to give evidence on his own behalf on Monday, leaving his lawyer to tell his side of the story. Bush was warned by Justice Marlene Carter, who is hearing the case alone, that she could draw an adverse inference from his decision, but he nevertheless turned down the chance to give his account.

Since he was first arrested the day after the killing, Bush has never explained what happened the night his son was gunned down at their family yard in West Bay. He has not claimed self-defence, though in confessions he allegedly made to two witnesses he suggested his son had been armed with a gun or a knife or he had attacked him with a piece of plastic pipe. Bush has also never offered an alibi or stated that he was not at the scene.

The crown’s case was that he was seen on CCTV going into Miss Daisy Lane not long before the murder in his black car, which was still parked there when the police arrived at the address following the fatal shooting of Shaquille at around 5:30pm on 12 November. According to the crown’s evidence, Bush had called his girlfriend, Nikkieta Ebanks (33), to tell her to pick him up on Hell Road very soon after Shaquille was shot multiple times and killed and not far from his Daisy Lane home where this had happened.

Prosecuting counsel Andrew Radcliffe QC had summed up the case emphasising the key elements that he said proved Bush was the gunman who “assassinated” his own son, motivated by an irrational and obsessive sexual jealousy, believing that Shaquille was the biological father of his daughter with Ebanks. The prosecutor said the evidence at the scene showed that Shaquille had tried to escape the deadly attack but was “finished off” with a gunshot to the back of the head after one of the other 14 shots fired at him had brought him down.

Radcliffe asked why, if Bush was innocent, he would flee the scene on foot without calling the emergency services, leaving his son to die in their own yard and go to the beach. Since it is clear he was at the location at the time of the murder, Radcliff asked why it was that he refused to cooperate with the investigators and tell them who killed Shaquille if it was not him. He said Bush had “the motive, the means and the opportunity” to murder his son and the evidence presented to the court proved he did. The evidence against Bush, both direct and circumstantial, was “compelling and convincing”, he said.

Since Roger Bush has never given an interview or a statement about the murder and turned down his last chance to talk during the trial, it was up to Oliver Blunt QC, his defence counsel, to explain Bush’s position to the court. While he implied that Bush was attending to drug business at the time of the shooting, he did not say where that was. Blunt focused his closing comments on what he said was the fabricated narrative of the two key witnesses and the possibility of other possible suspects in an effort to raise enough reasonable doubt about the accusations against his client.

He said Nikkieta Ebanks had maliciously fabricated a “deceitful narrative” that Bush was the killer because she hated him, and in WhatsApp messages to a friend she wrote she was going “to burn him to death”. Blunt said this false allegation was how she planned to do that. Attacking the other key crown witness, Candace Ebanks, Nikkieta’s friend and cousin, he said her memory was unreliable as a result of her ganja use and that she had allowed Nikkieta to frame the false narrative and gone along with it.

Blunt also sought to pin the blame on others, especially the long-running feud between Shaquille and Joshua Ebanks, aka “Patchie”, based largely on their dispute over girlfriends. He pointed to rumours on the street that Patchie was looking to kill Shaquille on the morning of the murder and was enlisting the help of Jamaican gangs to do it.

He also stressed the fact that there is no forensic evidence at all, such as gunshot residue or DNA, that tied Bush to the murder. However, there is evidence that Bush had disposed of the clothes he was wearing at the time of the killing and that he had washed himself in the sea two or three times the night before he was arrested.

Blunt said the gun used in the killing had a long criminal history attached to it but it was never linked to Bush. Aside from being used to murder Shaquille, the weapon, which was never recovered, had been used in nine other crimes, including murder, attempted murder, robbery and other incidents where guns were fired to threaten or intimidate people, and it was connected to a number of suspects. According to the crown’s case, the gun was disposed of in the immediate aftermath of the killing by Moses Bush, a family member who lived at the Daisy Lane complex.

But forensic evidence on the ammunition fired from the gun, which was described as a “gun for hire”, linked the weapon to two unsolved murders and several different gang members between 2016 and 2019, when the gun fell out of circulation. Most of those suspects were in jail at the time of the murder, with the exception of Patchie, who was eliminated from the murder early on in the case.

Nevertheless, Blunt said he was a much more likely candidate, but if it wasn’t him, street rumours both before and after the killing suggested that Jamaican gangs could also have fired the gun on Patchie’s behalf or for reasons connected to Bush’s drug business.

The defence lawyer wove an alternative narrative to the crown’s case, saying the motive given was ridiculous and false. He said there was a complete lack of any evidence of any previous animosity between Roger and Shaquille Bush. Using the evidence presented to paint a different picture, where Bush’s behaviour was fuelled by very different reasons from those presented by the prosecution, the lawyer said the crown’s case was littered with conflicts, which demonstrated the key witnesses were lying.

He said the allegation Bush murdered his own son was preposterous. When he returned home to his yard the morning after Shaquille was murdered and found the place swarming with the police, according to police notes, Bush had asked if they had arrested anyone yet. And illustrating the absurdity of the allegations, Blunt told he court that when they arrested him Bush had said, “What? For my own son?”

Blunt said that this false allegation was enough to cause him to try and kick out the police patrol car window as they took him away to the detention centre, and it was why Bush refused to answer questions. When he refused to be interviewed, Bush had told the officers, that he did not “have time for this foolishness”, and, as he held up his rights, he added, “I don’t have to do this. All I have to do is die.”

Blunt said Bush was not required to answer the absurd accusation that he killed his own son or the “misdirected investigation” that was fuelled by police bias. He said that the defence did not have to prove that others did it but that there were “more realistic candidates” with motives of their own, and the only reasonable verdict was not guilty.

Justice Marlene Carter presided over the case without a jury and is now required to provide a written judgment on her verdict. Recognising that Bush is on remand while facing a packed Grand Court criminal docket, she said the earliest she could expect to deliver the written verdict would be around 22 July.