Police officers escorting Sheldon Elroy Ludovico Williams (centre) into the Courthouse on Wednesday morning.
PHILIPSBURG--The suspect accused of causing the death of a man who was severely mistreated at the ACE Mega Center parking lot in Cole Bay shortly after 6:00pm on December 7, 2020, was sentenced to prison for twelve years, on Wednesday.
The judge in the court of First Instance sentenced Sheldon Elroy Ludovico Williams according to the prosecutor’s demand.
Williams (27), aka “Mouse”, was found guilty of deliberately taking James “Rusty” Cadillion’s life by hitting and kicking him in the face together with another, unidentified person.
The assault landed the 34-year-old victim at St. Maarten Medical Center, but he was flown out to Colombia in critical condition. However, treatment was to no avail and the resident of Rubber Tree Drive died one day later in a hospital in the South American country.
Williams was arrested on December 23, 2020, based on surveillance-camera footage and four witnesses’ statements, but he proclaimed his innocence.
Video-footage was shown in the courtroom during the hearing of this case on October 20, 2021, revealing that two men walked up to Cadillion and one of them hit him in the face several times. As a result, the victim fell to the ground and stayed down. His assailant kicked him in the head “with a shod foot,” the prosecutor said last month.
The two men walked away and returned a moment later, after which one of them picked up something from the ground and threw it at the victim’s head. The other man pulled him away and both walked off, leaving their victim unconscious in the deserted parking lot.
The victim was in an extremely critical medical condition, having sustained a fractured skull and brain trauma in the attack. Brain damage was caused by external force, pathological investigations revealed.
Four witnesses, including two police investigators, identified Williams as the “long, tall man with Rasta hair” seen in the video.
The airport construction worker by profession has several crimes mentioned in his criminal record. In 2018, the Court of Appeals sentenced him to 42 months. Judges considered him an accessory to the armed robbery of Scotiabank at Simpson Bay Yacht Club on June 9, 2017.
The prosecution held Williams for one of the two men involved in the “violent attack which did not last longer than 30 seconds.” The prosecutor considered Williams guilty of manslaughter, stating that it was he who kicked the victim in the head “with full force.”
Attorney-at-law Shaira Bommel pleaded for her client’s acquittal and challenged the reliability of witnesses who said they had recognised Williams on the video images.
However, the court established that the images and prints were sufficiently clear to perceive the “external characteristics” of the persons visible on them. Besides, several persons, among them a police officer who lives in the same area, recognised the suspect.
The court found Williams guilty of manslaughter. “The suspects left the victim for dead in the parking lot, where he was lying for a while before the emergency services were called,” the judge stated in the verdict. This “cowardly act” robbed five children of their father.
