PHILIPSBURG--“I never shoot anyone in my life,” is what Jose Luis Arrindell Moreno (22) told a panel of three judges on Monday in the hope of getting his 20-year prison sentence overturned by the Joint Court of Justice.
Last year, the Court of First Instance found the Dutch Quarter resident guilty of murdering 21-year-old Shaquon Adrien Kaheem Gumbs on April 20, 2021, near Tan Tan Supermarket on A.Th. Illidge Road. The lower court judge then ordered him to stay behind bars for the next two decades.
“I don’t have a bad heart,” Arrindell Moreno told the court on Monday, denying that he was the one who shot the victim in the abdomen at close range. “I would never go out of my way to hurt somebody.”
The Attorney-General saw the case differently, considering it proven that Arrindell Moreno had successfully executed a plan to kill the victim in cold blood.
On Monday, the three Appeals Court judges questioned Arrindell Moreno for two hours about the evidence in the case file, which included a compilation of footage from several surveillance cameras in the area.
The compilation video starts about three hours before the shooting and depicts a young man in a green shirt walking on a Dutch Quarter road. The person then walks into an alley and disappears. When asked by the judges, Arrindell Moreno identified that person as himself and said he used that alley to go to his house.
About an hour later, another person walks out of the alley wearing a blue T-shirt, long black pants and striped slippers. The Attorney-General considered that person to be Arrindell Moreno.
Although admitting that the person resembled him, Arrindell Moreno denied that he was the person in the blue shirt. He told the court that the person could not be him because, unlike himself, the blue shirt man did not have a tattoo on his left arm or a scar on his right jaw.
The compilation video switched perspectives to a surveillance camera outside a bar in Dutch Quarter. It depicted the blue-shirt man entering the establishment. Shortly afterward, the man comes back outside, jumps onto a scooter belonging to another young man, and drives off. The man is then seen driving between the bar and the nearby 911 projects.
The blue-shirt-man returns to the bar and goes inside for some time. Later, a man in a long-sleeved black shirt steps outside and walks out of view around a corner. The Attorney-General argued that this was Arrindell Moreno, who had changed his clothes inside the bar.
A few minutes later, a man in a similar black shirt comes back into view from around the corner and stops on the sidewalk on A.Th. Illidge Road. According to the Attorney-General, this is still Arrindell Moreno.
The young man with the scooter then rides from the bar, stops next to the black-shirt man, hands him a neck purse and parks the scooter close by. They wait for about five minutes before the black-shirt man jumps on the parked scooter and drives off in the direction of Middle Region out of the camera’s view.
A few minutes later, a scooter with a lone driver dressed in black is seen travelling in the opposite direction toward Belvedere. The victim’s car is behind the scooter. Suddenly, the scooter makes a U-turn, stops next to the victim’s vehicle, and a flash can be seen from the rider’s left hand.
Shot in the abdomen and bleeding, Gumbs turned his car around and headed towards Middle Region, probably trying to drive himself to St. Maarten Medical Center (SMMC). However, he did not make it and crashed into a wall further up A.Th. Illidge Road. He later died of his injuries.
Police arrested Arrindell Moreno and the young man who owned the scooter in July 2021 and interrogated them about the shooting. After their interrogations, police placed both of them together in a room and listened to what they would tell each other.
In this room, Arrindell Moreno allegedly told his co-suspect, “If it wasn’t for the camera, they wouldn’t even get a start.” The young man supposedly replied, “The camera mess up everything.” The transcript also has Arrindell Moreno telling the co-suspect, “You should have never tell them you hand the bag back.”
When asked about this, Arrindell Moreno told the judges that authorities misinterpreted the conversation and that they were swapping stories about what the police had asked them.
Later on, an investigating judge showed the co-suspect a still image of the blue-shirt man and he identified this person as Arrindell Moreno. When asked about this fact, Arrindell Moreno said, “I don’t know why he would say that’s me because clearly it ain’t me.”
The judges also questioned Arrindell Moreno about the content found on his seized mobile phone, particularly an entry that asked a search engine, “What does the Bible say about murder?”
Arrindell Moreno told the court that he got that phone from someone else and had not deleted their search history.
Based on the surveillance camera footage, the Attorney-General considered the charge of murder proven.
He said the defendant’s actions of changing his clothes, retrieving his bag and waiting by the roadside for the victim showed pre-meditation and careful planning. “It seemed like it was an assassination,” said the Attorney-General.
The Attorney-General also argued that one would need glasses if they did not recognise the man in the blue shirt as the defendant. Not only did the co-suspect recognise him, but he had on the same slippers and neck purse that Arrindell Moreno had on earlier that day.
As for the conversation between Arrindell Moreno and the co-suspect, the Attorney-General dismissed the defendant’s claim that they were simply going over their interrogations. He argued that they spoke about things the perpetrators would know.
Arrindell Moreno’s lawyer Shaira Bommel pleaded for her client’s acquittal based on a lack of sufficient legal and convincing evidence.
Bommel emphasised her client’s story that he was home that evening getting his hair braided. She supported this alibi with the testimony of a witness who told the investigating judge that the gunman did not look like Arrindell Moreno and that she had seen him at his house shortly after the shooting. Bommel argued that this witness would have recognised him if he had actually been the one to pull the trigger because she had known him for a long time.
It cannot be concluded from the surveillance camera footage that Arrindell Moreno was the shooter, Bommel argued.
To back this up, she pointed to the fact that the suspect being tracked in the compilation video goes out of frame no less than three times, and each time the investigators assumed that it is the same person coming back into view. She said this is particularly true when the scooter driver allegedly shoots into the victim’s car.
“What is the make and model of scooter and who is driving cannot be determined conclusively from the case file,” Bommel said. “The camera is too far away to say for sure that my client is the one on that scooter, or if it is even the same scooter as before.”
Bommel also mentioned that the co-suspect arrested with Arrindell Moreno had been acquitted by Court of First Instance for being an accomplice in Gumbs’ murder.
The Joint Court of Justice will render a verdict in Arrindell Moreno’s appeal on November 13.
