Murder case witness says former police officer intimidated her into silence

A woman told the Grand Court that she was threatened into silence by an auxiliary police constable, days after her stepson was gunned down in a hail of bullets by his own father.

Speaking via video link from a remote location on Friday, the witness told the court that shortly after Shaquille Bush was murdered outside his Miss Daisy Lane home in West Bay on 12 Nov. 2019, she and Bush’s father Roger Devard Bush were both taken into custody.

“I was going to tell police everything that I knew, but then I became afraid,” she told Justice Roger Chapple in the judge-alone trial.

When questioned by Scott Wainwright, the assistant deputy director of public prosecutions, she told the court it was because she believed Bush was sending a message to her through a police officer.

“When I got back into my cell from my smoke break, he told me that, ‘The boss man say you must hold it down,’” said Ebanks. “I was confused so I said, ‘Excuse me’, to which he then said, ‘Are you deaf? The boss man said hold it down and answer no comment to a police interview.’”

She told the court she didn’t know the officer’s name but she has since come to learn he was Courtney Alphanso Levy, who at the time was an auxiliary constable with the RCIPS.

Levy, 45, is on trial for one count of obstructing the course of justice and another charge of breach of trust of a public officer.

The incident is said to have occurred on 17 Nov. 2019 at the police detention centre at Fairbanks, George Town.

According to the witness, the following day when she was taken to do a formal audio-video interview by a police officer in the presence of her attorney, she answered all the questions with ‘no comment’.

Eventually, Ebanks would go on to cooperate with the police and, in June 2021, Bush was charged with the murder of his son, and convicted in September the following year. He is currently serving a 33-year prison sentence for the crime.

The revelation of the alleged intimidation by Levy came to light during the trial, and in October last year he was charged, and eventually discharged from the RCIPS.

Levy denies the allegations and remains on bail.