In a case that has lingered for more than two years, criminal extortion proceedings against immigration officer Monique Escalante have been terminated without a trial, after authorities failed to locate the Jamaican traveler who first brought the $3,000 extortion allegation against her.
The legal saga began in March 2024, when Janhoi Shaun-Dhee Richards, a Jamaican national, filed a formal complaint alleging that Escalante and two other unidentified immigration personnel confronted him shortly after his arrival at Philip Goldson International Airport. According to Richards’ original claim, when he told the officers he was carrying no large sums of cash, they escorted him directly to an on-site ATM, where he was forced to withdraw $3,000 USD and hand the money over to the group.
Following the filing of charges, Escalante, who has repeatedly maintained her innocence, was placed on official administrative interdiction and released on bail ahead of trial. She remained out on bail through the entire duration of the pre-trial process, and reappeared at the High Court for a scheduled hearing on Tuesday this week.
Prosecutors from the Crown spent months attempting to contact Richards to secure his testimony for the trial, reaching out through every available channel: phone calls, email communications, and direct outreach via social media platforms. None of these efforts yielded a response, and the key witness could not be located to appear in court to give evidence. Left with no in-person testimony, prosecutors applied to have Richards’ original out-of-court statement admitted into the record as hearsay evidence.
The admissibility of this statement was debated at length during a pre-trial voir dire hearing, where four separate witnesses gave testimony related to the issue of the statement’s credibility.
In his final ruling, Justice Pilgrim granted the no-case submission put forward by Escalante’s defense attorney Leslie Hamilton. With the prosecution’s central witness unavailable to give sworn testimony in court, and Richards’ out-of-court statement deemed insufficient to sustain the extortion charge on its own, the Crown entered a formal nolle prosequi — a legal order that formally discontinues the prosecution — bringing the entire case to a close.