FORMER heavyweight champion Trevor Berbick pleaded innocent yesterday to charges of breaking into a neighbour’s home and stealing several items, officials said.

Resident Magistrate Bertrand Morrison set a trial date for April 29, defence lawyer Heron Dale said.

The neighbour, Gwendolyn Facey, told the court that she would be willing to withdraw her complaint filed last week, alleging Berbick had stolen several things from her home in eastern Portland, Dale said.

But Morrison said the charges could not be dropped once the police complaint was filed, police said.

Police issued an arrest warrant for Berbick last week, after a search of his home turned up items that were reported stolen from his neighbour, Facey, including an electric drill, a pickax and some clothes.

The Observer correspondent in Port Antonio reported that Dale told the court the case should be treated as a civil rather than criminal matter. The entire issue, he said, had flowed from a family dispute.

Dale told the court that Facey is the common law wife of Berbick’s brother and that the house which was broken into was family-owned. A number of people had keys and access to the house, he said.

Berbick, who won the WBC heavyweight title in 1985 and lost it to Mike Tyson a year later, was deported from the United States to his native Jamaica in December after US Immigration and Naturalization Service determined he illegally re-entered the country after being deported to Canada in 1997.

Berbick, 48, was deported after breaking the conditions of his 1994 parole and serving 15 months of a four-year sentence for rape, theft and misdemeanor assault in Florida.

He has no prior criminal record in Jamaica.

Berbick, who beat Muhammad Ali in 1981 and won the heavyweight crown in 1985 on a decision over Pinklon Thomas, was convicted of assault in 1991 for holding a gun to his former business manager’s head and accusing her of stealing US$40,000 from him.

A year later, he was convicted of raping a family baby sitter.

The same year, he was convicted of second-degree grand theft for forging his ex-wife’s signature to get a US$95,000 mortgage on a house in Miramar, Florida.