Man pleads guilty to shooting Arima taxi driver in the head

A MAN who pleaded guilty to shooting an Arima taxi driver in the head in 2003 will serve three more years in jail.

On Thursday, Justice Norton Jack sentenced Andrew Simpson after he pleaded guilty to felony murder.

Felony murder is categorised as a violent arrestable offence and applies when someone commits a certain kind of felony and someone is killed in the course of it. It does not carry the automatic death sentence reserved for murder convictions.

Simpson was before the court charged with the murder of taxi driver Anslem Regis and larceny of a motor vehicle.

In considering the aggravating and mitigating factors of the offence, the judge began with a sentence of 26 years for felony murder and eight for larceny.

He then adjusted that figure down by one year after considering the aggravating and mitigating factors related to the felony murder and three years for the larceny.

The one-third discount for the guilty plea was applied to both offences and the 13 years, eight months Simpson spent in prison was further deducted, leaving a three-year sentence to serve for the killing.

It was ordered he had already served his time for the larceny.

Simpson was represented by public defenders Stephen Wilson and Tonya Thomas and the State was represented by prosecutor Charmaine Samuel.

It was the prosecution’s case that at about 9 pm on June 11, 2003, Regis left home to work his Honda Civic taxi on the Pinto-Santa Rosa route.

A short while later, he was shot in the forehead and thrown out of the car along Pinto Road.

The next day, while police were on patrol in Cunupia, they saw a blue Mazda 323 in which the four occupants were slouching as they passed.

PC Guelmo and the other officers directed the car to stop and when they searched Simpson, they found four live rounds of 16-gauge ammunition in his pants pocket. They also found a homemade double-barrelled shotgun in the car.

A CD player and $140 in cash were also found and one of the men told Guelmo the CD player was taken from a car that had run off the road.

The four men were arrested and when they took them to a forested area close to where the Mazda was stopped, the police found Regis’ Honda. There was blood in the car and wires on the dashboard.

The men were taken to the Cunupia police station and the cars and other items were taken for analysis. The men were then taken to the Arouca police station, where Simpson agreed to give Cpl Judy Badal, a crime scene expert, his clothing, which had blood on it.

That same day, pathologist Dr Hughvon des Vignes did an autopsy on Regis’s body and ruled he died of a shotgun wound to the head.

Blood samples were also handed over to Insp Bullen, who was leading investigations into the murder.

On June 13, Badal swabbed Simpson’s hands and those of the three other men, and tests showed there were nitrite (gunshot) residues on his hands but not the others'.

Sgt Johnny Abraham and Bullen interviewed Simpson at the station and he told them he was liming in Bon Air when one of his friends pulled up in a Honda Civic and asked him to “make a turn.”

He said when he got into the car, “I see it have blood between the two front seats. I ask him who car it is and he told me a man get shot in it,” Simpson told the officers.

A statement was taken from him in the presence of a justice of the peace and when cautioned, he said, “Officer, the truth is, I was sitting in the front seat of the dead man car. (Names called) was sitting in the back seat.”

He claimed one of the men pulled out a double-barrelled shotgun and pointed it at the man's head. Simpson jumped out of the car, heard a loud explosion and saw the man lying on the road, bleeding from his head.

Another of the men also jumped out. But they got back in and went with the others to Cunupia before police held them.

Blood of Regis’s blood type was also found on the men’s clothing.