Rawle Blackman died at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation on Sunday November 13 after reportedly sustaining serious head injuries in circumstances which, up until now, appear unclear. One version of how he sustained his injuries suggests that he met with an accident while cycling along Wellington Street. A second account states that he was deliberately struck down by a motor vehicle. The driver of the vehicle which allegedly struck Blackman reportedly said that he had been trailing him from the scene of a robbery, a chain-snatching, which the dead man had committed elsewhere in the city earlier that day. The driver denies that he deliberately struck Blackman down.
What, it appears, is not in doubt is that there is no direct connection between the alleged chain-snatching and the incident that led to Blackman’s death, the latter having occurred on Wellington Street, in an entirely different part of Georgetown from Water Street where the chain-snatching reportedly took place.
In at least one respect the case of Rawle Blackman is not an unfamiliar one. We have grown accustomed to violent deaths under ill-explained circumstances in which there has been a deliberate official focus on the character of the victims. Many of these have been police killings and the subsequent accounts of how the victims met their end have alluded to previous criminal records, often laced with specific details of the crimes said to have been committed. Those police character sketches have usually been precursors to the swift closing of such cases without anything remotely resembling rigorous investigation into the killings.
So accustomed have we become to this pattern that some of us might even have come to accept the notion that there is a lesser official obligation to account for the deaths of persons who are either believed or known to be of dubious character than in cases where the victims are known to be law-abiding citizens. At least that is what the posture of the police may have led some of us to believe. Under the law, of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
While the police had nothing to do with Rawle Blackman’s death, the reports regarding the circumstances under which his injuries were sustained appear to place his character at the centre of the affair. Precedent, therefore, dictates that we wonder aloud as to whether the focus on the alleged chain-snatching incident is intended to offer a clue as to the level of official diligence that is likely to be applied in the search for the truth as to how he met his end.
The point should be made of course that we hold no brief for Mr Blackman. We are in possession of no reliable insights into the character of the man. What surely is not in question, however, is the duty that exists under the law for his death to be accounted for, whoever or whatever he might have been. The obligation to do so becomes even weightier when account is taken of the fact that we have, in recent years, had to endure the lawlessness of a number of ill-explained deaths, many of them widely believed to have been extra-judicial police killings, without even as much as a public enquiry or even, in some instances, some other plausible pronouncement from the police.
No less reprehensible than what often appears to be a nonchalant official indifference to loss of life in violent circumstances is what seems to amount to a broader public acceptance that such indifference is a way of life and that there is really little that we can do about it.
It is, of course, not uncommon for investigations into deaths, particularly violent ones, to take account of the character of the victim. The question is, however, whether what those investigations uncover ought to inform official judgment as to if such deaths should be properly investigated or whether they should simply be allowed to pass as if the victim never existed in the first place. It is not just a matter of the rights of the victim. We also owe it to ourselves and to the claims we make to being mindful of the importance of upholding the rule of law to diligently seek the truth about how Rawle Blackman met his end. Who he was or might have been is altogether irrelevant in that pursuit.
