Roger Anthony charged with murder
Police have detained two men who are no strangers to the law, relating to shootings on Wednesday and Thursday which flared-up violence in the city among two rival gangs and is threatening to escalate. This morning, thirty year old Roger Anthony was back in court to face murder charges for the shooting death of twenty-two year old Dillon Bennett. This latest charge has to do with the Wednesday shooting on Central American Boulevard in which Bennett and nineteen year old Akeem Gotoy were shot in the back of their heads while they sat in a green car near the intersection of Mahogany Street and the boulevard. According to sources, Gotoy, who is still hospitalized at the K.H.M.H., received threats to his life this morning. Whether those threats had anything to do with Wednesday night’s shooting is unknown because he has also had his own share of run-ins with the law and like Anthony, he has faced murder charges that were later withdrawn.
Today, Anthony was also charged with the attempted murder of Gotoy, Henry Humes and Stephen Flowers. He was represented by Attorney Bernard “BQ” Pitts and was remanded in custody until October thirty-first.
The other man police have is Darren Banks who up until late this afternoon had not been charged in relation to Thursday’s shooting which is believed to have been in retaliation of the Wednesday night incident. He has been identified as the driver of a green car that carried another person who opened fire on three men then sped away. No one was injured in the shooting.
Background information on Anthony shows that in February 2005, he and Mark Alamilla were charged with the murder of mechanic Lloyd Bodden who was shot and killed in front of his residence on Ebony Street. He was later freed of the charge because Bodden’s wife, a key witness, went to live in the United States. And more recently in August, Anthony and another man, Joseph Panting walked free of a charge of murder. They were charged with the murder of Kirk Ortega who was gunned down on September fourth, 2007 on Rio Hondo Street in front of Pratts Fry Chicken. The charge was withdrawn because a witness recanted her statement and gave a new one in which she said she did not see the shooter. As for Gotoy, charges against him for the September 2005 shooting of Sherwin Requeña and attempted murder of Dona Magdaleno Cayetano, were withdrawn. Requeña was gunned down at the corner of Zackariah and Oleander Streets as he stood talking to Cayetano. Darren Banks was also charged for Murder in the same incident and freed.
