DEREK ACHONG

Se­nior Re­porter

derek.achong@guardian.co.tt

Mu­si­cian and so­cial jus­tice ac­tivist Lou Lyons is sat­is­fied with the re­sponse of the South Caribbean Con­fer­ence of Sev­enth-day Ad­ven­tists to him af­ter he was im­pli­cat­ed in the mur­der of spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor Ran­dall Hec­tor af­ter at­tend­ing a church ser­vice.

Ear­li­er this week, Lyons’ lawyer Joel Rop­er is­sued a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter threat­en­ing a defama­tion law­suit if he was not giv­en an ex­pla­na­tion and a pub­lic apol­o­gy.

On Thurs­day, the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s pres­i­dent Pas­tor Leslie Moses is­sued a press re­lease ex­tend­ing sym­pa­thy to Lyons.

Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, Rop­er con­firmed that Lyons was sat­is­fied with the re­lease and would no longer be seek­ing to pur­sue lit­i­ga­tion over the is­sue.

Short­ly af­ter Hec­tor was shot and killed while leav­ing a ser­vice at the Stan­more Av­enue SDA Church in Port-of-Spain on De­cem­ber 31, 2024, an im­age of Lyons in the church was shared on so­cial me­dia.

The im­age of Lyons had an ac­com­pa­ny­ing cap­tion al­leg­ing that he was not known to the con­gre­ga­tion, was seen tex­ting and speak­ing on his cell phone, and was seen walk­ing in the di­rec­tion Hec­tor was in when he (Hec­tor) was at­tacked.

Lyons threat­ened le­gal ac­tion as he claimed that his per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al rep­u­ta­tion was tar­nished by the wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed post.

He claimed that the post jeop­ar­dised “very im­por­tant” cor­po­rate spon­sor­ship deals which he and his band Free­town Col­lec­tion were in the process of ne­go­ti­at­ing.

Hec­tor’s fu­ner­al took place at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the South­ern Caribbean (USC) in Mara­cas, St Joseph, on Thurs­day.