FREEPORT – Bahamian police have detained a 12-year-old boy in the disappearances of five schoolboys, alleging that he buried one of them in a field after an accidental drowning, the boy’s mother told The Herald on Tuesday.
Brenda Roberts, the mother of Deangelo Stephan Dorval, said police officers took her son to a wooded lot behind their house early Monday and asked him to point out the area where he buried the body of Jake Grant, who has been missing since May.
Dorval denied any role in the death but hours later police announced that they had zeroed in on a lead in the case, roped off the lot and brought in cadaver-sniffing dogs.
‘He said, `I don’t know where it [Grant’s body] is because I didn’t put it back there,’ ” Roberts quoted her son as saying, as she choked back tears. The two boys, both 12-year-old eighth graders, have been best friends since they lived in the same apartment building in 1999, Roberts said.
Police explained the theory to Grant’s family Tuesday. They didn’t buy it either.
CLOSE FRIENDS
”I don’t think none of that’s the truth. Jake and [Deangelo] were like this,” James Ellis, who has raised Jake since he was 2 years old, said, pinching his two fingers together. “Brothers, you see?”
Deangelo’s detention does not appear to account for the fate of the four other boys who have disappeared since May in a case that has rocked the Bahamas, an island nation unaccustomed to major crimes.
FIRST TO VANISH
Grant disappeared first, and within two weeks Mackinson Colas, 12, and Deangelo McKenzie, 13, both vanished. Another boy, Junior Reme, 11, disappeared in July. The last to go missing, Desmond Rolle, disappeared Sept. 28.
The missing boys all vanished from the same area of Freeport, the Bahamas’ second largest city, and all but one worked bagging groceries at a local Winn-Dixie supermarket and played games at the same arcade — prompting investigators to link the disappearances.
Police have not revealed what evidence they have found, or how many people they have detained. Assistant Commissioner Ellison Greenslade, who heads the investigation, canceled a press conference Tuesday.
Relatives said at least four people are now being detained — though not charged — in the disappearances; Dorval; Prince Mackey, 19, Deangelo’s cousin; Robert Don, 11, a neighborhood friend; and another 11-year-old playmate.
DETAINED, RELEASED
Dorval’s mother also was detained over the weekend, but released Monday night.
Police told several of the relatives the same story:
Robert Don and another friend claim that the night Jake disappeared, they saw him at a wake in a local apartment complex. Afterward the friends went back to Dorval’s apartment complex to swim. There, Jake accidentally drowned, and Deangelo, frightened, took him into the field and buried him rather than fess up to what had happened.
Robert Don’s mother, Mirland, said Tuesday she hadn’t talked to her son about that night.
”I don’t know what to believe,” she said, adding that she only wants her son, detained since Sunday, released. “They put him in a cell, and my boy is 11 years old. He didn’t commit a crime.”
Dorval maintains he last saw Jake the day before he disappeared, his mother said, when the two had been working on a research project for school on the Bahamas tourism industry.
Police first detained Dorval Aug. 8 but later released him. He was detained again Sunday, and has been at police headquarters since.
Police have harassed him in detention, his mother told The Herald in an interview, calling him a liar, and asking him to confess.
‘He says, `Mom, everything I try to tell them, they tell me I’m a liar,’ ” Roberts recalled her son saying. The two talked often while they both were detained.
BY MARIKA LYNCH
mlynch@herald.com
