PHILIPSBURG--A suspect was sentenced Thursday to twelve months, six of which were suspended, on two years’ probation, for possession of an illegal firearm and 539 grammes of marijuana.
In front of the judge in the Court of First Instance, Camron Qureek Thewet (23) did not deny that he had a Glock firearm with 12 cartridges and the drugs in his possession when he was apprehended by the police near Firefighter’s Roundabout in Philipsburg on December 30, 2022.
In reaction to the spate of armed robberies committed at jewellery stores in the capital of St. Maarten around that time, the police noted that Thewet and another person were riding in circles on a scooter in Philipsburg. The police thought that was suspicious and dispatched a patrol after the two men. They tried to escape by running off on foot, but Thewet was nevertheless arrested.
He told the police he had found the loaded gun “next to a truck” and had decided to keep the weapon for his protection.
“That’s what everyone says about themselves,” the judge told the defendant, “but at the same time lots of bad things happen, robberies, killings, and it is forbidden to carry a gun.”
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the semi-automatic weapon was investigated by the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), and it emerged that the weapon had been used in two crimes in St. Maarten and Anguilla. These crimes are still under investigation, the prosecutor said Thursday.
Thewet spent 14 days in pre-trial detention. He was released on the orders of the Prosecutor’s Office due to a lack of capacity in the Pointe Blanche prison. Nevertheless, the prosecutor said Thewet was guilty of committing two serious crimes.
“It can be fear or that he made enemies, but we don’t know that now, perhaps later,” the prosecutor said about Thewet’s firearm possession.
Attorney Thaїsa Heymans claimed that the evidence against Thewet – the firearm and the drugs – had been obtained illegally because her client was the victim of police profiling.
“My client is no criminal. He is trying to better his life and is busy obtaining a General Education Development (GED) diploma at University of St. Martin. He acknowledges that it was dangerous that he had a firearm with him,” the lawyer said.
“You can argue whether you were planning a robbery, as the police suspected, but the moment they stopped, turned on the flashing lights [of the police vehicle – Ed.] and tried to stop you, you threw the scooter on the ground and ran off, and only then were you apprehended,” the judge told the defendant at the end of the hearing.
“Running away from a [police] stop raises suspicion that you were doing bad things, andthat made your arrest lawful,” the judge said in sentencing Thewet according to the prosecutor’s “quite reasonable, and honestly, also low demand.”
