Wayne Alphonso Bellafonte Jr., 33, who was accused of killing two people and injuring a third in a deadly shooting outside a George Town bar in 2021, has been found guilty of two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.
A Grand Court jury delivered its unanimous verdict on Monday afternoon in the case, which had undergone numerous delays since Bellafonte was first brought to court in October 2022 for the shooting deaths of Mark Andre Ebanks, 36, and Eldon Walton, 55, outside the Globe Bar on Martin Drive, George Town, on 1 July 2021.
Ebanks died on the night of the shooting and Walton, who was shot in the leg and chest, succumbed to his injuries about two weeks later.
The jury also found Bellafonte guilty of one count of possession of an unlicensed firearm.
The court had heard that Bellafonte was one of three masked men who had made their way through the dimly lit back roads of the Central Scranton neigbourhood to the Globe Bar, where they opened fire on a group of men gathered outside the establishment.
Gunfire had been returned during the shooting, and one of the three shooters was struck in the shoulder. Later, blood found in one of the vehicles used by the gunmen was matched to Bellafonte, the prosecution had stated during the trial.
“A DNA sample from a buccal swab [lining of the cheek] from the defendant … and one from the bloodstains … were examined by an expert who says the chances of that bloodstain coming from someone in the Cayman Islands population other than the defendant was one in 46 quintillion [46 million trillion],” said Scott Wainwright, assistant deputy director of public prosecutions, when opening the trial on Friday, 24 May.
Bellafonte was treated for a gunshot wound at the George Town Hospital about an hour after the Martin Drive shooting. He claimed his injury occurred when he was robbed and shot after buying ganja in West Bay – an account Wainwright described as a poorly constructed, fictitious narrative that should not be believed.
During the murder trial, the jury was shown CCTV video of the three shooters making their way to and from the scene on foot. The shooting itself was not captured on camera.
Wainwright had told the jury that four main threads of evidence linked Bellafonte to the crime – his DNA, the fact that one of the two vehicles used by the killers was registered to Bellafonte’s mother, Bellafonte gave a fictitious account of his movements, and his cellphone data matched the movements of the vehicles.
Justice Cheryll Richards is expected to deliver her sentence on the case on 7 Nov.
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