Court of Appeal judges have rejected an appeal against conviction by Roger Bush, who is serving a 33-year sentence for killing his son in a “hail of bullets” while in a jealous rage.
Bush had been found guilty in the judge-alone trial in 2022 of murdering his 24-year-old son, Shaquille Bush, in the late afternoon of 12 Nov. 2019 at their home on Miss Daisy Lane in West Bay.
During his trial, the court had had heard that the elder Bush, 50, believed his son was having an affair with his partner and had fathered a child with her.
According to evidence at the trial, Bush had fired at his son 15 times, hitting him at least five times.
He had been sentenced to life in prison for murder, with a minimum term of 33 years, as well as 10 years for possession of a firearm, to be served concurrently.
In his appeal hearing, held on 1 May this year, Bush’s legal team argued that Grand Court Justice Marlene Carter had failed to consider all the evidence at the trial and had given too much weight to the credibility of two female witnesses, including the elder Bush’s girlfriend.
In their written judgment, the appeal court panel, presided over by Justice Sir John Goldring, noted that the defence had argued that Carter had “failed fully to consider all the contradictory evidence presented during the trial regarding the reliability and credibility” of the girlfriend and the other witness, her cousin.
The defence also argued that the judge had not fully considered evidence from eyewitnesses and CCTV footage relating to “the presence of unidentified Jamaicans and/or other persons of interest connected to three untraced vehicles and their occupants who left Miss Daisy Lane” around the time of the shooting.
“Insufficient attention” had also been paid to historical DNA and ballistic evidence in connection with the murder weapon, Bush’s defence claimed, noting that the firearm, which has never been recovered, had previously been used by members of the Birch Tree Hill gang.
The defence also argued that the trial judge had not given enough consideration to evidence that showed there had been “frequent clashes involving the use of firearms” in the three years before the killing between Shaquille Bush and Joshua Ebanks, aka ‘Patchy’, and of the “far more plausible scenario of an execution by Ebanks and/or unidentified Jamaicans”.
‘Convincing case’
The Court of Appeal judges, in their ruling, said they felt the case against Roger Bush was “a convincing one”, noting that by the time Bush had phoned his girlfriend at 5:15pm, evidence suggests that his son was already dead “and his body was lying in Miss Daisy Lane”.
Bush “did not report that his son had been shot. He ran away and went on the run”, the judges said.
“That he was merely a drug dealer, making off to evade police lest his drug dealing be revealed, seems to us, in all circumstances, highly improbably,” the justices added.
They stated that two witnesses had testified that Bush had admitted to killing his son and had described his conduct as being “consistent with being responsible for the murder”. Their testimonies were backed up by independent evidence, including cellphone analysis and CCTV footage, the judges said.
This included evidence by the girlfriend that Bush had told her he had told Moses Ebanks “to get rid of the thing”, meaning the gun. Prosecutor Sarah Lewis, in the appeal hearing, had noted that the witness would have had no way of knowing that CCTV evidence showed Moses Ebanks arriving at the address on Miss Daisy Lane shortly after the shooting and leaving nine minutes later.
Bush was initially arrested the day after the shooting, but was not charged until a year and a half later. Police also arrested his girlfriend on suspicion of aiding and abetting, but while at the police station, she was threatened by Auxiliary Police Constable Courtney Alphonso Levy, who warned her to stay quiet. Levy was sentenced to four years in prison in December 2023 for his efforts to intimidate her.
The appeal judges said they did not believe the two female witnesses had fabricated their accounts.
They also took into account the fact that Bush did not give evidence in his own defence, noting that the trial judge was correct in her assessment that he “provided no explanation because there was none which could stand up to scrutiny”.
The judges concluded that the verdicts could not be said to be “unsafe or unsatisfactory”, therefore, they were dismissing the appeal against both verdicts.
Justice Cheryll Richards read aloud the appeal judges’ ruling in court on Friday morning, as Bush listened via video link from Northward prison.
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