“THERE is no cover up,” said Police Sgt. Fred Sato, the Department of Public Safety public information officer, referring to the ongoing investigation of an accidental discharge of a gun that injured a seven-year-old boy on May 21.
In an interview with reporters on Tuesday, Sato said an investigation is a process. “People need to understand that [before we can] charge a person we need to build a case, we must analyze evidence as gathered, get interviews, witness statements, and all that. Everything is a process, it’s part of the system,” he added.
As to the gun itself, Sato said, “Right now we cannot confirm whether the weapon involved is a service firearm pending analysis.”
“The expended cartridge from the weapon…all that is going through testing, and once those things are confirmed then we can provide the exact information that everyone is asking,” he added
Sato said the home where the incident happened has “multiple firearm owners, that is also the reason we need an analysis, to confirm whether it came from a service firearm or a personally owned firearm.”
“If it was found to be a service firearm, if there’s a determination of negligence, DPS Commissioner Clement Bermudes will take action, I’m pretty sure of that,” Sato added.
“There were two kids…playing inside the house. Because they are juveniles, and it’s early in the investigation, we don’t want to speculate who fired what until we can have confirmation from our counterparts in Guam. As we know with investigations, we want to get the facts right before we start issuing out statements of what really happened. Because we don’t have a crime lab here in the CNMI, we rely on our partners in Guam who have a crime lab to do an analysis on the ballistics. Because we still don’t have an analysis of the expended shells, we can’t give information on whether a law enforcement officer is involved. Part of DPS’s transparency is, we want to make sure that we dot our i’s and cross our t’s, and not just jump into an investigation, and later down the line we found the information that we provided was not accurate,” Sato said.
Sato said he cannot provide information on when the ballistics report was sent to Guam. “I need to get that information from [the] investigators…but for what’s going on in Guam, it may take time, as they are still in the process of recovery from Typhoon [Mawar].”
He added, “As to who pulled the trigger, we are still looking into that.”
Fred Sato
