Gun victim said to have been related to gang members
Father-of-one Randy Robinson may have been murdered because he had relatives in a gang, according to a prosecutor.Two men are on trial at Supreme Court accused of shooting 22-year-old Mr Robinson dead on the evening of March 31, 2011.Prosecutor Garrett Byrne alleged that Jay Dill, 23, was the pillion passenger on a motorcycle who shot the victim on Border Lane North, Devonshire.Devon Hewey, 24, is alleged to have been the rider. Mr Byrne said that makes Mr Hewey equally guilty of the murder in the eyes of the law, as the crime was a “joint enterprise”.The prosecutor told the jury the case is made up of “a number of different strands, mostly of forensic evidence, linking these two men to the murder. It’s not unlike a jigsaw, and at the end of it, we will leave you in no doubt”.He also explained: “Members of the jury, I am not going to insult your intelligence by pretending you don’t know what’s going on in Bermuda. You know young men gather together in gangs, and you may hear some evidence from a police officer experienced in the membership and behaviour of such gangs.“You may well hear from that witness that when one gang strikes out against another, the other gang will want to retaliate, and there’s therefore this endless cycle, it seems, of retaliation and shooting. You may hear that the defendants associated with one gang and Randy Robinson, although not himself a member of a gang, was related by blood to two members of a rival gang.“Once you have heard that evidence, you may conclude that it’s enough to be related to a rival gang to make you a target.”The victim’s mother, Roydell Robinson, gave evidence yesterday that two of her nephews are believed to be in the Parkside gang [see separate story].Mr Byrne said of Mr Robinson: “He was at the time of his death, living with his mother. He went to school here in Bermuda, went to Canada to study computers, and came back. He was, by all accounts, popular with the girls and he loved football. It was a game he lived for, according to his mother. In December 2008 he became a father to a young boy. He worked at the hospital and was, by a strange stroke of fate, to be murdered by the son of his supervisor, Sandra Dill, who will be a witness in this case.”Turning to events on the night of the murder, Mr Byrne said Mr Robinson spent the evening at home on Border Lane West with his girlfriend. Around 8.30pm, he started walking up Border Lane North towards Friswell’s Hill, in order to meet his father for a lobster dinner.A man in the area — who cannot be identified due to a reporting restriction imposed by the judge — witnessed the victim walking up the road, and the murder that came next.According to Mr Byrne, the witness saw a black bike ridden by two men wearing dark clothing come onto Border Lane and stop.“It was very dark, but he saw the pillion passenger turn his body, and with his left hand pull out a gun from his waistband, hold it up and point it at Randy Robinson and fire shots.”Mr Byrne said witnesses heard between three and five shots, two of which hit Mr Robinson.The jury heard from pathologist Christopher Milroy that the first bullet went straight through Mr Robinson’s heart and the second — fired while he was on the ground — went through his brain.The killers rode back out of Border Lane. According to Mr Byrne, the eyewitness was unable to identify them because they wore full-face helmets with the visors pulled down.The prosecutor said the jury will hear about a Honda bike and a Yamaha bike found by police in the yard of a home next door to Mr Hewey’s home on Palmetto Road.“Both the bikes belonged to the defendants ... I would ask this rhetorical question: ‘Why is it they hid the bikes?’” said Mr Byrne.He added that further evidence will be given about clothes seized from Mr Hewey and Mr Dill, which were sent for forensic analysis. Additional testimony will come from a gunshot residue expert and a ballistics expert.Mr Dill, of Southampton, and Mr Hewey, of Pembroke, deny premeditated murder and using a .38 calibre revolver gun to commit that crime. The case continues.