Rasbert Turner, Gleaner Writer
SPANISH TOWN, St. Catherine:
THOUSANDS OF colleagues, friends and well-wishers flocked the Clear Park Seventh-day Adventist Church in Gordon Pen, St. Catherine, yesterday, to pay their last respects to slain police Sergeant Hewitt Chandler.
The occasion was an emotionally charged one with several tributes and items rendered by those in attendance. In his tribute, chairman of the Special Constabulary Association, Sergeant Christopher Bowen, renewed the call for capital punishment to resume.
Sergeant Bowen told the gathering it was a travesty to have criminal elements preying upon policemen and/or living off taxpayers money. He said the time has come for the resumption of hanging, saying it was the only message that persons of like mind would understand.
A GREAT DISRESPECT
In echoing the sentiments of Mr. Bowen, secretary of the Jamaica Police Federation, Corporal Hartley Stewart, called for residents to assist the police in dealing with the disrespect that is being meted out to them. He said, however, that the greatest disrespect being paid to police is that from a government which does not want to make the lives of police better. He asked what more disrespect could be meted out to police when it is thought that to ask for better wages and better working condition is contemptuous.
Most of those in attendance lauded the late Sergeant as a counsellor.
"We know this man for some years now, for eight of which he was a member of the church and we found him to be a great individual," one church member said.
Heather Robinson, chairperson of the Police Support Action committee, said the only dignity left in the way the policeman was butchered in cold blood was that the perpetrators were caught and over 100 rounds of ammunition seized. She asked how many other lives would have been snuffed out if they had got away with so many rounds.
Sergeant Chandler was gunned down while waiting at a traffic light on Waterloo Road on May 4. He was 50 years old.
