A hapless cop who was a first responder at the home of Jolyan Silvera the morning when his wife Melissa was discovered dead, last Friday came in for some amount of criticism from Chief Justice Bryan Sykes for allowing himself to be sidetracked by the emotional politician.

According to prosecutors, Melissa was killed sometime between the night of November 10, 2023 and the morning of November 11, 2023. The prosecution’s narrative is that sometime after 10:30 that night Silvera told his wife and children he was leaving and he would return the following day. The Crown said his wife told him he could not leave and an argument ensued. According to the children the adults swore at each other and he left.

Sometime before 6:00 am the next day one of the children went into his parents’ room and discovered his mother’s lifeless body on the floor next to her bed. He observed that blood was coming through her “butt, mouth, and nose”.

The Crown said the child ran from the bedroom and alerted his brother who accompanied him back to their parents’ room. They indicated that they both checked for signs of life and then decided to make contact with their father and “were eventually successful”.

The prosecution, in referring to a witness statement given by the former People’s National Party parliamentarian before he became a suspect, said in that statement Silvera indicated that upon speaking to his children that morning he contacted the Stony Hill Police Station and told them that he needed assistance.

He said upon arrival at the house, he went into his bedroom, saw his wife sitting in a position with her head leaning forward at the side of the bed. According to his children, “he touched her, spoke to her” and found that she was not responding.

According to the Crown, the sergeant from the Stony Hill Police Station, on arriving at the home shortly after, went into the room with Silvera where he saw the body of Melissa “on her knees, in a crouching position with her face lying on the floor”.

He said he photographed the body at which point Silvera “cried out”. He said he then told the husband to cover the nude section of his wife’s body, and did not carry out any further examination of the body.

The cop indicated that Silvera advised him that Melissa had no known medical condition, and he indicated that a post-mortem would be conducted to determine the cause of death.

A funeral home was then contacted to remove her body.

The cop claimed he then told Silvera, “ ‘Do not do anything to the bedroom pending the post-mortem examination,’ as the cause of death was undetermined.” However, indications are that Silvera, who said he did not know this, undertook several repairs to the bedroom, repainted walls, sprayed over furniture, and retiled that room and his children’s room in the days following.

“You can’t be there being taken in by all of this. You go and you see a body as a police officer, you’re not a pathologist but at the very least you should be saying, ‘Don’t touch the body. [Let me] call the crime scene persons. Let us see what happened here.’ So I wouldn’t expect the police officer to be going over there pretending as if he’s a forensic pathologist but the police officer — being, I suppose, misguided sympathy here — was being taken in by the act of Mr Silvera to the extent that the police officer now, rather than doing his duty, he is now treating this as if it’s just an unexpected death that may have been by a heart attack or some such thing,” the chief justice noted in his sentencing address which culminated with Silvera being sent to prison for killing his wife.

“During that time Mr Silvera would have known that he was the person who was responsible for her death. The post-mortem says she got three gunshot injuries, and he was even telling the police officer that as far as he knew, she had no known medical condition that would cause her to be in the state that she was found — which is all the more reason why the police officer should have been far more alert than he was,” the chief justice added.

Her body was then removed and taken to the morgue, and a post-mortem scheduled for December 1, 2023. A pathologist who arrived to do the post-mortem observed “marks on the body”, and as a result the body was sealed and detectives called to assist in the investigation.

On December 15, 2023 the same pathologist conducted a post-mortem and noted “that there were three gunshot wounds, one perforating gunshot wound to the front right thigh, one penetrating gunshot wound to the left side of the lower abdomen, and a third described as a superficial penetrating gunshot wound to the right side of the lower abdomen”. The immediate cause of death was due to multiple gunshot wounds.

During the post-mortem, the pathologist removed two projectiles from the body of Melissa and handed them over to a police officer. Silvera became a suspect and was taken in to custody. He is the licensed holder of a 9mm Glock pistol. This firearm was taken from him and submitted to the State forensic lab for ballistic testing, along with the two projectiles removed from the body of his wife.

The ballistic examiner made a comparison and test-fired the gun in January 2024, took results from those test fires, and compared them to the projectiles that were removed from the body. He found level-one characteristics matching the projectile from a Glock pistol and also found that there was some amount of level-two matching striations and “additional markings that were unusual”.

Silvera had been charged on an indictment containing two counts — count one charging him with the offence of using a firearm to commit a felony, contrary to Section 14(2) of the Firearms (Prohibition, Restriction and Regulation) Act, and count two charging him with the offence of murder. In February this year he entered a plea of not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter, two years after insisting that he was innocent in relation to the death of his wife. The plea was accepted by the prosecution and the court.

Last Friday the chief justice, in sentencing a seemingly repentant Silvera to 20 years and 10 months behind bars, said, “In the case here we are not dealing with involuntary manslaughter but voluntary manslaughter.”

SILVERA… sentenced to 20 years and 10 months behind bars for killing his wife