A third per­son has ap­peared in court charged with the mur­der of six-year-old Par­ris Grif­fith and the at­tempt­ed mur­der of her moth­er, which oc­curred on Sat­ur­day 20th Au­gust 2016.

28-year-old AKEI­DO ED­WARDS of Strak­er Vil­lage, Laven­tille, al­so was charged with ar­son, when he ap­peared be­fore a Mag­is­trate in the Port of Spain Mag­is­trates’ Court, on Wednes­day 25th March 2020, to an­swer to the charges.

The mat­ter was ad­journed to April 22nd 2020.

On the morn­ing of Sat­ur­day 20th Au­gust 2016, the woman and her daugh­ter, Par­ris Grif­fith, were at home in their wood­en struc­ture dwelling house at Strak­er Vil­lage, Laven­tille, when she re­al­ized the house was en­gulfed in flames. The woman suc­cess­ful­ly es­caped through a hole at the side of the house but was un­able to se­cure her daugh­ter’s es­cape. Res­i­dents al­so were un­suc­cess­ful in their at­tempts to res­cue Par­ris.

Fol­low­ing ex­ten­sive in­ves­ti­ga­tions by the Cold Case Unit of the Homi­cide Bu­reau of In­ves­ti­ga­tions, Ed­wards was sub­se­quent­ly ar­rest­ed on Sat­ur­day 21st March 2020 by of­fi­cers of the In­ter-Agency Task Force at his home.

Charges were laid by Cpl Nar­ine on Tues­day 24th March 2020, fol­low­ing ad­vice re­ceived from Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions, Roger Gas­pard SC, on that same date.

Two oth­er per­sons were pre­vi­ous­ly charged with this mur­der.

AK­IL EL­DER, 31, al­so known as ‘Bun Up’ and AKO JOHN, 30, both of Strak­er Vil­lage, Laven­tille, were joint­ly charged with the of­fences. They ap­peared in the Port of Spain 10th Mag­is­trates’ Court, on Thurs­day 19th De­cem­ber 2019 and were re­mand­ed in­to cus­tody.