More than a week after being arrested, a 38-year-old mason, Rodger Mattison has finally been charged with the quadruple murder which rocked the community of Sobo Village in La Brea, earlier this month.
After two days of deliberations, Ag Director of Public Prosecutions Roger Gaspard gave the all clear for police to charge the suspect with the murders of Abigail Jones-Chapman, 41, her daughter Olivia Chapman, 16, friend Michaela Mason, 14 and landlord, Micheal Scott, 69, who were killed at Scott’s home at Khani Settlement, Sobo Village, on March 14.
The charges read that between March 11 to March 14, 2018, he murdered the four people.
The accused, from Gonzales Village, Guapo, was arrested around 9 am on March 16, walking along a roadway leading out of St Albans Quarry, located 200 metres off the Valencia Stretch.
Officers of the La Horquetta Crime Patrol Unit, under Sgt Vaughn Waldropt, made the arrest after receiving information that he was hiding out in the area. The suspect had a green knapsack packed with clothing at the time he was held.
In an interview yesterday, the suspect’s attorney Fareed Ali said he has been visiting his client on a daily basis and was satisfied that he was getting all that was legally due to him as a prisoner.
“He is getting the opportunity to bathe and change his clothes. He is being fed and whenever I want to see him, I am was allowed to visit him,” Ali said.
Jones-Chapman, a Spanish teacher at the Southern Academy of the Seventh-Day Adventists, La Romaine, was beaten to death at her apartment. Her daughter, Olivia, a student of the Point Fortin East Secondary School was also beaten and stabbed to death, while Mason’s throat was slit. Scott, who is believed to have come to the defence of the females, was bludgeoned to death with a cricket stump.
Jones-Chapman’s younger children, ages 12 and eight, were found unharmed in Scott’s apartment upstairs.
Investigators suspect the killing stemmed from a domestic dispute between Jones-Chapman and the suspect after she ended their one-year relationship the previous week. (Trinidad Guardian)
