An employee of a car wash on Lyndhurst Road in St Andrew, where police Constable Noel Maitland took a settee to be power-washed in July 2022, on Tuesday identified pictures of the day the piece of furniture was brought to the establishment.

Maitland is on trial in the Home Circuit Court in downtown Kingston for murder and preventing the lawful burial of a corpse following the July 12, 2022 disappearance of his 24-year-old girlfriend, Donna-Lee Donaldson.

Donaldson was an entrepreneur and social media influencer.

She was last seen alive at the Chelsea Manor apartment complex in New Kingston, St Andrew, where Maitland lived.

The former car wash employee is the 13th witness in the case to give evidence. She is doing so via video link from a location overseas.

The seven-member jury will hear testimony from 33 witnesses in the case in total.

After prosecutors showed her the first of a number of pictures from closed-circuit television footage, the witness said, “That’s the man that brought the settee. He is under [the shed of] the service area where we wash the cars.”

The witness told the court that in the picture Maitland was wearing a white T-shirt, brown shorts, and a pair of slippers.

She also identified a truck which, she said, had brought the settee to the car wash.

On Wednesday, July 23, the witness had said she recalled a grey car driving onto the compound of the car wash about 9:00 am and a brown man came out and spoke with her.

She was asked by the prosecution to look around the courtroom to see if she saw the person she referred to as the brown man and she replied that she did not see him.

The prosecutor asked if she had ever seen the accused again after that day. She said that she had not.

According to the witness, on the morning of the day when she spoke to the accused, he drove out and returned in the afternoon about 1:00 pm with a truck.

“He came with a settee in the back of the truck — blue and white truck. It was a brown three-piece settee. They took it from the truck — the brown man and the two guys that accompanied him. They were putting the settee where the cars were washing and I called [out] to them and spoke to them,” she said.

According to her, the brown man was short in stature and had a thick body.

Explaining the process of washing the settee, she told the court that she used degreaser and bleach.

“That’s what we use to clean,” she said, adding that she poured degreaser on the right corner of the settee where there was a dark spot.

The dark spot, she said, wasn’t big.

She testified that she washed the settee with a power wash gun and observed what she believed was a lot of blood. That prompted the defence team to raise an objection, saying out that she was speculating that it was blood.

Asked by the prosecution why she said it was blood, the witness explained that it smelled raw.

“I said, ‘Jesus, this yah one yah must dead or him bleed out. Look like them kill smaddy inna it.’ The guy that came along with the brown man then came with vinegar. I spoke to him and told him to get two more bottles of vinegar,” the witness said.

“The brown man took the power wash gun from me. Him start wash the settee himself. I was right there standing. I don’t know how long he was washing it, but it was not very long. It was longer than the duration I was washing it. I see a lot of blood, blood like rice grain coming from the right corner of the settee,” the witness told the court.

She said she saw so much of what appeared to be blood that it was frightening.

Asked if she had made any other observations, the witness said “Yes,” and explained that a lot of flies were around the area and the spot that was raw.

The witness is scheduled to continue giving testimony on September 16.

DONALDSON… last seen alive at the Chelsea Manor apartment complex in New Kingston where Maitland lived