Sergeant demoted for Neglect of Duty

Meanwhile in Dangriga, a police sergeant felt the full brunt of the law and has been demoted to the rank of corporal. The officer was additionally fined three hundred dollars after a tribunal of his peers found him guilty of Neglect of Duty. Sergeant Reymundo Reyes was placed on interdiction in mid-May of this year after he was accused of witnessing police constable Keith Cruz physically abuse a resident, and made no attempts to stop him.

The report came to light when the victim, Rhold Henry, and his attorney, Antoinette Moore, appeared on the media denouncing the abuse. That incident occurred on Friday, May sixteenth, when Henry, a taxi driver, got into a confrontation with an off-duty constable, twenty-five year old Keith Cruz in Dangriga. When the scuffle ended, Henry had been stabbed in the leg and had to receive medical treatment at the Southern Regional Hospital.

But it was while he was under police guard at the hospital that Cruz entered Henry’s room around one-thirty the following morning and viciously beat him with his service revolver. Henry said he was handcuffed to the hospital bed and pistol-whipped and it was only when an attending nurse forced her way into the room that Cruz and Reyes exited the room.

Cruz is on interdiction while his case is heard in Magistrates’ Court. He is charged with Aggravated Assault, Wounding and Harm.