THE seven-week search for a missing cop ended yesterday after DNA tests confirmed that a torso, which fishermen found in the Hunts Bay basin on September 4, was that of Constable Devon Pearson.

Earlier tests conducted on the skin of the badly decomposed human trunk had been inconclusive.

“The search is now over,” Deputy Superintendent Denzil Boyd of the Portmore police, told the Observer yesterday. “The skin samples showed nothing, but the (latest) test on the bone revealed that the DNA matches those of his parents.”

Yesterday, as they received word of the positive ID, Pearson’s colleagues were saddened by the news but grateful that the mystery of his disappearance was at least partially solved.

“Pearson left us in a horrible way, but at least we can be sure that he is dead and at least some questions have been answered,” said one constable from the Portmore station.

Meanwhile, the South St Catherine police have vowed to pull out all the stops to nab those responsible for murdering the young lawman.

Pearson, 29, is the ninth police officer to be murdered this year.

He went missing a week before his badly decomposed torso was found in murky, crocodile-infested waters at the delta of the Rio Cobre. Two days after his disappearance in late August, his black Nissan Sunny motorcar had been found with the radio missing and the keys in the ignition in the Caymanas Bay area.

According to the police, Pearson was last seen when he signed off duty at the Portmore police station where he was assigned. He was in possession of his 9mm service pistol at the time of his disappearance.

Pearson, cops say, used his car as a route taxi and investigators believe he was abducted and murdered while moonlighting as a cabbie. They had received information that the young cop had been dismembered and parts of his body thrown into the Rio Cobre.

In the weeks following his disappearance, Pearson’s colleagues from the South St Catherine police division, along with members of the Caribbean Search Team, the Jamaica Defence Force and a handful of concerned civilians, vigorously searched for the missing cop. They conducted searches in the Caymanas Bay area, along the banks of the Rio Cobre, in the heavily-bushed area behind the Big Lane community of Central Village and in bushes at Lakes Pen.

It was during one of these searches that the cops were told that the trunk of a body which was missing its arms, legs and head, had been found in the brackish waters just across from Jamworld Entertainment Centre. The cops, led by DSP Boyd, waited for hours in boats near to the putrid body, for a government pathologist, Dr Kadiyela Persaud, to perform an on-the-spot autopsy on the torso. As they waited, a fisherman told police that he had snared two human arms in his net the day before, but fear led him to throw them back — along with his entire night’s catch.

However the Marine police’s search of the area did not turn up the limbs.

Though the on-the-spot autopsy did not determine the cause of death or the identity of the torso, the body had what appeared to be stab wounds.