Months after Alaine Garcia Disappearance, a Murder Charge Laid Against Hattieville Resident
Albert Jones Sr.
There has been a major development in a missing person case dating back to February of this year, when thirty-five-year-old Alaine Garcia was reported missing. The Hattieville resident was last seen returning home on Sylvestre Boulevard after taking his children to catch the bus to go to school. While no body has yet been found, police say that someone has confessed to his murder. That person, forty-five-year-old mechanic Albert Jones Senior, appeared in court charged with murder before Senior Magistrate Aretha Ford. A charge of murder in a case where no body or evidence of foul play has been found is unusual. But as we reported in February, shots were heard on the street as Garcia was returning home, and it is believed he may have been injured and tried to flee. Garcia’s common-law wife explained what she thought happened to News Five and we replay a portion of that story.
Alaine Garcia
Voice of: Kellyn Neal, Common-Law Wife [File: February 23rd, 2018]
“Now the police know that they and the media, they don’t have a good relationship. They can’t expect someone to walk up to them and say ‘oh, this young man get shot,’ they need to do their investigation. Come to find out that my common-law wasn’t detained any at all – or so they say, that it wasn’t him because the pictures I am seeing of this Alaine Garcia, it’s not him. So I started to put it together, and said if this incident happened about seven-thirty to seven-thirty-six, that’s the time when he is walking back from taking my kids to catch the bus. Because they go and catch the bus quarter to seven, and the bus comes quarter past seven, and it’s a fifteen-minute walk from the roadside to my house back. And then when I continued to ask round the village, eyewitnesses are telling me that when the gunshots rang off, they saw him run. So my speculation is that he probably got shot and because the area is very big, he probably ran in the bush and collapsed and can’t make it out back.”
Garcia officially remains missing. He and his family had moved from Belize City due to various acts of intimidation. Police did not offer specific details on how Garcia may have died or what led them to Jones and his confession. Jones was remanded to the Belize Central Prison and returns to court on June twenty-sixth, 2018.
