A disruption in the service provided by telecoms giant Digicel on Wednesday morning led to the unavailability of a witness in the Noel Maitland murder trial, stalling the matter which prosecutors are hopeful will resume today.

The setback resulted in senior prosecutor Claudette Thompson and trial judge Leighton Pusey empathising with the seven-member jury for attending court so often only to have the trial repeatedly put off, but asked them to bear with the process.

Maitland is being tried for murder and preventing the lawful burial of a corpse in relation to the July 12, 2022 disappearance of his social media influencer girlfriend Donna-Lee Donaldson.

She was last seen alive at the Chelsea Manor Apartment complex in St Andrew where Maitland lived.

“We had a particular witness for today and one for tomorrow [Thursday]. All the time I was in communication with her. Since then we have not been able to establish communication at all. A subpoena was served on her. In fact, it is she who insisted that we prepare it so that she could be released by her employer,” Thompson told the jurors.

“Upon a visit to her workplace late Monday evening, we discovered that she was contracted to work at a particular official function of national importance,” Thompson added.

She said numerous attempts were made to contact the witness; however, each attempt failed.

“One of the service providers’ service is down. We have asked our police to try and re-engage her at her workplace but we have not been successful yet. We expected her to come and then the other witness we had for tomorrow [Thursday]. We tried to engage the scene of crime officer and in the middle of those discussions the service went down. The long and short of it is that we have no witnesses here today for those reasons,” the prosecutor explained.

Judge Pusey asked the jurors to remember that unforeseen things do happen, causing delays, which they have experienced on numerous occasions since the start of the trial in the Home Circuit Court, downtown Kingston.

He added that arrangements would be made to ensure that the trial would not be held on Fridays, to afford the jurors the opportunity to look about important personal business.

“The last time we had a power cut that knocked out everything. Now, we have the Digicel service going out and causing problems in relation to that. We just have to persist, and we will have to persist. Since we know that we are going to be taking some time in this matter, we are going to do our best to ensure that we won’t have to be here on Friday so you’ll have time to do your personal business and important things,” he said.

On Tuesday, the jurors listened to a former car wash employee complete her testimony as a witness. She testified from overseas via a secure video link.

According to her, in July 2022 a man brought a sofa to the car wash where she was employed. He requested that the furniture be washed.

The witness said she saw “blood like rice grain” coming from the sofa as she power-washed it.

Based on her belief that the substance was blood, she remarked while washing the sofa that whoever the blood belonged to must have died and bled out.

“Look like dem kill somebody inna it,” she told the court.

The employee claimed that while she was convinced what she saw was blood, it was never confirmed to her by the police.

DONALDSON… was last seen alive at the Chelsea Manor Apartment complex in St Andrew where Maitland lived