No po­lice of­fi­cer or ve­hi­cle was near to Beetham Gar­dens res­i­dent Or­nel­la Greaves up to three min­utes pri­or to her get­ting shot.

This was the claim of Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith as he made ref­er­ence to an ini­tial footage re­view done dur­ing the po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to Greaves’ death.

“We have found video footage to show that when the un­for­tu­nate death of that la­dy in Beetham, we have video footage and you are look­ing around and there was ab­solute­ly no po­lice of­fi­cer or ve­hi­cle around that area for about three min­utes un­til that per­son, un­til a po­lice ve­hi­cle turned up,” Grif­fith said dur­ing the week­ly TTPS me­dia brief­ing at the Po­lice Ad­min­is­tra­tion Build­ing in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day.

Greaves was shot last Tues­day as she record­ed protest demon­stra­tions at the Beetham Gar­dens fol­low­ing the shoot­ing deaths of Joel Ja­cobs, Is­rael Clin­ton and Noel Di­a­mond at Sec­ond Cale­do­nia, Mor­vant, on June 27.

She was tak­en to hos­pi­tal by po­lice where she died while re­ceiv­ing treat­ment.

Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Grif­fith said that con­trary to sug­ges­tions by Beetham res­i­dents, po­lice were not im­me­di­ate­ly near to the scene of the in­ci­dent.

“When the in­di­vid­ual was on the ground there was no po­lice of­fi­cer around for sev­er­al min­utes be­fore they ar­rived,” Grif­fith said.

How­ev­er, video shared on so­cial me­dia on the day of the in­ci­dent seemed to show of­fi­cers at the site when Greaves was ac­tu­al­ly shot.

Those same of­fi­cers im­me­di­ate­ly re­spond­ed to place her in a ve­hi­cle, even as one par­tic­u­lar Beetham res­i­dent ac­cused one of the of­fi­cers in the group of shoot­ing Greaves.

Grif­fith yes­ter­day ad­mit­ted they were al­so seek­ing more footage rel­a­tive to the in­ci­dent, as they have not ruled out the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the preg­nant moth­er of five was killed by a po­lice gun.

“I have been li­ais­ing with the Foren­sic de­part­ment to put this as pri­or­i­ty. We have to look at the bal­lis­tics to ver­i­fy what weapon was fired and I have asked the DCP Op­er­a­tions Mr (Jayson) Forde to look at video footage of all po­lice ve­hi­cles sev­er­al min­utes pri­or to her shoot­ing and sev­er­al min­utes af­ter and we are get­ting the weapons of all the po­lice of­fi­cers to be able to look at true bal­lis­tic test­ing to see if any of those weapons were fired,” he said.

The Com­mis­sion­er al­so again be­moaned the lengthy time pe­ri­od re­quired to com­plete foren­sic test­ing. (PC)