An­na-Lisa Paul

An Aranguez fa­ther of one who plead­ed guilty to lar­ce­ny of a gold chain from a child­hood friend on Car­ni­val Sun­day has been sen­tenced to ten days' hard labour to be sus­pend­ed up­on the com­ple­tion of 100 hours of com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice.

While Ker­ron King will not im­me­di­ate­ly serve any time in jail, he has a year in which to com­plete the com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice be­fore he re­turns to court to have the con­vic­tion nul­li­fied.King, 18, of Aranguez Main Road, was charged with steal­ing the chain, val­ued at $1,000, from a long­time friend on Feb­ru­ary 10, af­ter he met the vic­tim walk­ing along the road.

King was ar­rest­ed af­ter po­lice on mo­bile pa­trol were stopped and in­formed of the rob­bery.He was lat­er charged by PC Moses of the Barataria Po­lice Sta­tion.King ini­tial­ly ap­peared be­fore Chief Mag­is­trate Mar­cia Ay­ers-Cae­sar in the Port-of-Spain Eighth Court on Ash Wednes­day, and reap­peared be­fore Mag­is­trate Cheron Raphael on Fri­day in the Third Court on Feb­ru­ary 15, when he plead­ed guilty.

King's at­tor­ney Mansergh Grif­fith said King was re­morse­ful for his ac­tions and had been un­der the in­flu­ence of al­co­hol at the time.Dur­ing his ap­pear­ance be­fore Ay­ers-Cae­sar, King said he had stolen the chain be­cause that par­tic­u­lar friend had once tak­en a chain be­long­ing to him, and had nev­er re­turned it.