The prosecution in the continuing trial of 25 alleged members of the so-called Tesha Miller faction of the Klansman gang on Tuesday redoubled its efforts to establish the identity of a man whose body was found in a rubbish heap along the Lakes Pen main road in St Catherine in 2022.

That man, said to be Zamari McKay, was, according to the Crown, a victim of the accused Carlos Williams, Jermaine Clarke, and Owen Billings who have been indicted on counts 28 and 29 of the charging document for “knowingly facilitating” McKay’s robbery and killing.

A week ago the Crown had been forced to pause the testimony of its second witness on that count after the defence mounted objections to its method of eliciting evidence from a police constable on the counts.

The prosecution, through that cop, had attempted to lead evidence detailing a series of events leading up to the disappearance and gruesome discovery of McKay’s body, which would have included several telephone exchanges that the cop had with individuals seemingly linked to McKay’s disappearance and subsequent murder.

The witness’s evidence was disturbed several times by objections from the defence who, among other things, argued that the prosecutor marshalling the evidence was “leading” the witness and was bordering on eliciting hearsay. Furthermore, the defence raised questions about the voice identification evidence, stating that no foundation had been laid to allow the Crown to do so and that the “prejudicial effect” of that evidence “outweighed the probative value”.

Justice Palmer, in ruling on the submissions at the time, said, “I believe more foundation needs to be led at this time,” adding that he was “particularly cautious”, given that there is no evidence led by the Crown as yet to establish that McKay was dead.

Justice Dale Palmer, who sits alone without a jury, pointed out that he is not privy to the facts and statements in the case until they are laid in court. He said he had weighed the potential risk of prejudice to the defendants on the counts and as such could not approve the Crown’s application to elicit that evidence from the cop. Furthermore, he said there was no evidence as to who the witness was speaking to on the call.

On Tuesday, another prosecution witness — the lead investigator in the case — told the court that he, on August 11, 2022, after being alerted, travelled to the Lakes Pen area where he saw a body lying face down in an “illegal dump area”, feet bound and with gunshot wounds.

The cop, a detective sergeant, who said he escorted the morgue personnel to Spanish Town Hospital with the body, testified that he also retrieved from McKay’s body a driver’s licence bearing his particulars, his Taxpayer Registration Number (TRN) card, along with an identification card and bank card belonging to another individual.

“The photograph on that driver’s licence matched the description of the deceased man,” he told the assistant director of public prosecutions eliciting the evidence. The cop said he packaged those items and kept them “under lock and key”.

The Crown, on Tuesday, was successful in having those items tendered and admitted into evidence. The lead investigator said he also attended the post-mortem of McKay who was identified by a relative and that he also recorded statements from several close acquaintances of the dead man.

In the meantime, he said information which came to the fore during the course of his investigations were handed over to JamaicaEye, the national CCTV surveillance network. According to the cop, he was “shown certain things and as a result made an application for the extraction of footage” from the archives of the system. He, however, said he did not receive the requested footage.

The lawman is scheduled to continue his evidence on Wednesday morning at 10:00 when the matter resumes in the Home Circuit Division of the Supreme Court in downtown Kingston.