The Tribune

By DANA SMITH

Tribune Staff Reporter

dsmith@tribunemedia.net

A WOMAN wants an apology from the police after she says an officer approached her car, opened the door and aimed a gun at her face while she sat in the driveway of her son’s home.

Cecelia Bain, 41, said she spent the night in hospital with high blood pressure afterwards having been left shaken and scared.

She told The Tribune: “I pulled up in the yard - the car wasn’t off yet, this person pulled up, open my car door and put the gun straight to my forehead. I feel my hair standing up. I saw the gun and my purse was right there and I’m thinking, I might be getting robbed.

“Then when I turned around I saw a lot of flashing lights. I came out and said, ‘What’s going on?’ He said: ‘Don’t worry about that. We’s the police’.”

Ms Bain had just come from a family dinner and had driven to her son’s house in Wilkinson Street to see her grandson just before 10pm on Sunday.

She said: “I live in the Bernard Road area and my family came from off the island and we had an eat-out. After the eat-out and they were dropped home, I went to see my grandson at my son’s house.”

Ms Bain said the officer appeared ‘suddenly’ and she didn’t notice any police presence.

“They just yuck (the car door) open and gone and put the gun straight to my forehead. I just hear the door open and gun in my face,” she said.

“I was very terrified. Very terrified... I was so scared when I come out of the car, I just dropped. I dropped down.”

The officer had come off a nearby police bus and a police inspector who was apparently overseeing the group of officers approached her afterwards, Ms Bain said.

“I saw the inspector there and I said ‘you know something, just suppose I had my Mace’ - because my boss gave me a mace to tote around, ‘suppose I had just saw the gun and tried to defend myself and spray him with the Mace’. Then he say, ‘well if you get shoot, you get shoot’.”

Ms Bain said she tried to tell the inspector, “this isn’t right”, and that after it happened she heard officers on the bus calling for the group to leave.

“I said, ‘Inspector, you know this is not right’. He said, ‘that done happen and the only thing we can do right now is apologise to you’ - and all the police were saying, ‘man, let’s go’. He just turned around and left. They didn’t even apologise,” Ms Bain said.

“I want them to know that same thing left me sick. I was very shaken up. I came out (of the hospital) after 8am on Monday. My children didn’t even know where I was. I went straight to the hospital because I know my pressure. My pressure was high.

“I want an apology from the police. That particular person he needs to be trained. He’s not trained properly. If you had a flashlight and said, ‘please get out of the car’ or something, I wouldn’t have been so afraid, I would have just come out.”

An officer at the force’s Complaints and Corruptions Unit said they had as yet received no official complaint about what Ms Bain said happened and would advise her to go to their office to file one.