By Latrishka Thomas
Jahson Martin of Jennings will be spending the next seven months behind bars for stealing building materials that formed part of a criminal investigation, from a police station.
On August 22, officers from the Langfords Police Station executed a search warrant on the property of a Belmont man, where they discovered a stockpile of building materials, power tools and hand tools, some of which had been reported stolen.
Some of the materials, to include 21 pieces of 2×4 lumber and 29 form-ply, were placed in a truck belonging to the owner of the premises and taken to the Langfords Police Station for the purpose of the investigation.
However, at around 4am on August 26, an officer discovered that the truck containing the materials had disappeared from the compound. A subsequent search located the truck in some bushes in the Bolans area.
A warrant was subsequently executed on the defendant’s premises, where 18 of the 2×4 lumber pieces were retrieved.
The defendant confessed to stealing the items valued at $5,072, but claimed that he had paid an on-duty officer to transport the truck from the police station to him.
In an attempt to spare his client a custodial sentence Martin’s attorney, Lawrence Daniels, argued that the 24-year-old was not the mastermind behind the operation and couldn’t have stolen the items without the assistance of the implicated police officer.
Nevertheless, the court deemed the crime serious enough to warrant incarceration, resulting in Magistrate Dane Hamilton Jnr imposing a seven-month prison term on the defendant.
