Eight years for killing teen on ganja farm

The man who gunned down 18-year-old Tyrell Brann a decade ago was yesterday sentenced to eight years in prison.
Granville Gordon, 34, pleaded guilty to the lesser offence of manslaughter two days into his trial on an indictment for murder.
In sentencing the convict, Justice Iain Morley said, “Granville Gordon, please stand up. For the reasons I have explained, the sentence I pass for your plea to the manslaughter of Tyrell Brann, shooting him in a sense ‘by accident,’ with an illegal 9mm pistol, intending only to scare him, while chasing him off your farm, his having come with others armed to steal marijuana plants from you, is eight years imprisonment. Time spent on remand shall count. You may go down.”
That last order meant “down” from the prisoner’s box to the holding cell at the High Court, from whence he was taken back to Her Majesty’s Prison where he is to serve the time.
Gordon spent two years on remand and that’s the time that will be counted as part of the eight years imposed yesterday.
Crown Counsel Adlai Smith, who led the trial for the prosecution, had accepted Gordon’s guilty plea to manslaughter, thus halting the murder trial after only two days.
But before the plea came, the court had heard that Brann and his friends, “Tishon, Julian and Brandon, all around the same age, went to a farm near Five-Islands Village during the afternoon of Saturday, January 5, 2008 in search of cannabis they had heard was growing there.”
It was said that it was common knowledge that Gordon, then aged 24, farmed the land, and was in a shack sleeping.
At the sentencing hearing, the judge recounted that Gordon’s dogs barked at the intrusion and this woke him up.
The judge further recalled, “He called out for the trespassers to leave, firing a warning shot out of the window. He then chased Tyrell, who had separated from his friends, firing again. Tyrell’s three friends, who had run the other way, did not see what happened to him. Tyrell’s body was found by police two days later, deep into undergrowth at least a half mile from where he had last been seen, shot dead through the back of the head.”
Gordon accepted in court that he killed the 18-year-old and then moved his body far into hiding. But, he had initially lied to the police that he had only chased him and did not know what had become of him.
Justice Morley said that in assessing the sentence, the court noted that at least one of the intruders was armed, with a 0.22 firearm, which was discharged to threaten Gordon at the scene, as evidenced by a recovered cartridge near his shack.
He also highlighted the fact that the next day, Sunday, January 5, 2008, the remaining three intruders returned to look for Tyrell Brann, “with a posse of many other men, who had at least seven revolvers between them, directly threatening to kill Gordon and his fellow farmer, Anson Farrell, if harm had come to Tyrell.”
The judge said that the evidence showed that Gordon intended to frighten Brann and his friends on the first day by shooting the 9mm pistol above his head.
He said, “so that the bullet striking Tyrell in the back of the head as he was running off, killing him instantly, was strictly unintended, and in a non-legal sense therefore unlucky and an accident. For this reason, the offence can be characterised as ‘lesser intent’ manslaughter, being an intent falling short of the mens rea for murder.”
Gordon fled Antigua immediately after his encounter with the posse on the Sunday, at first to Montserrat, and was not seen again in Antigua until March 2016, when he was deported by St. Vincent owing to immigration troubles. He has been in custody since his return.