Jasmine Hartin smiled when called ‘first lady here to kill a cop’: inmate
An inmate who was locked up in a Belize jail cell adjacent to Jasmine Hartin reportedly claimed the socialite smiled at him when he congratulated her for being the “first lady here to kill a cop.”
The man, who identified himself as Jose, 48, told the Daily Mail that the 32-year-old partner of British billionaire Lord Michael Ashcroft’s son was bloodied when she was hauled into the San Pedro police station on Friday.
Hartin threw a tantrum when guards refused to allow her to smoke or access her “pills,” Jose told the news outlet.
He said she then claimed that San Pedro Superintendent Henry Jemmott was gunned down by someone from a passing boat.
Hartin reportedly changed her tune when told she would be charged with cocaine possession.
She then said she had been giving Jemmott a massage while they were drinking together on a pier when she accidentally shot him while handing him his pistol.
“I heard there was a shooting that night but I didn’t know that she committed it,” Jose told the Daily Mail.
“When I found out I applauded her, I said, ‘You are the first lady here to kill a cop.’ She just smiled. The rest of the guys applauded her and said, ‘You have guts to do something like that.’”
Jose, who claimed he was detained for breaching the coronavirus curfew, justified his cruel delight at hearing about the death of the father of five because the slain cop had once searched him for drugs and kicked him off the island.
“I don’t have good feelings about him. I asked her, ‘Did you do it?’ She said, ‘No.’ She just told me a boat passed and shot him,” Jose told the Daily Mail.
“I asked how blood was on her clothes and she told me the guy dropped on her. She said he fell on her and she shook him off,” he said. “I wanted to know what was going on between them. She said they were friends. Lovers? ‘No.’”
“They have a cell for the ladies and a cell for the men. I was right next to her. I can’t say whether she was doing drugs or what, but she looked really f–ked up,” Jose added.
“She was pissed off and cussing up the cops saying, ‘You motherf–kers, what the f–k is wrong with you guys?’ because she wanted to smoke a cigarette.
“The cops didn’t want her to smoke so she said, ‘I need my f–king pills.’ The cops didn’t want her to have her pills, either. They were laughing at her,” he told the outlet.
“Afterwards she told me who she is and that she has a hotel. They took her out to bathe, gave her clothes, they took her out to test for the gunpowder,” Jose continued.
He said the woman also refused a meal of tacos and gave him her juice, saying she couldn’t eat.
“She was mad. She was pissed off. She didn’t want to eat. I gave her a water bottle and she told me, ‘Thanks.’ Then in the morning her lawyer came. All I told her was, ‘Don’t tell anything to the cops, just speak to your lawyer,’” Jose added.
In a separate interview with 7 News Belize, Jose suggested that Hartin was roughed up by police.
“To be real with you, what I saw in the morning, in the night that they brought her, really they were roughing her up because it was a cop that died. So to be real with you, what I saw, it wasn’t nice,” he told the local outlet.
“So the cops took her inside and I don’t know if they gave her medication or what, but five minutes after, they took her to the bathroom and a female police officer took off her clothes and put it in a bag, and they gave her some clothes,” he said.
“I noticed that she was really f–k up. So I can’t say if she was doing drugs or what but she was really, she was lost that night,” he said.
Hartin — who is charged with manslaughter by negligence — was transferred Tuesday to the notorious Belize Central Prison, which once appeared in an episode of the “Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons,” the UK’s Independent reported.
The overcrowded prison — ironically nicknamed the “Hattieville Ramada,” in reference to a nearby town — holds dozens of rival gangs as well as patients suffering from mental illnesses in the same general population as other inmates, according to the outlet.
Robinson Michael, a former prisoner, told 7 News how some parts of the facility were so dilapidated that inmates managed to break out “by just bending the rickets because of the corrosion of the salt air.”
He claimed the terrible conditions led to the death of inmate Albert “Zeke” Gordon, who died of respiratory problems.
“They left this man back there unsupervised until the man ended up choking on his own blood and died,” Michael told 7News, according to the Independent.
In October, 28 prisoners staged an armed breakout after taking hostages, the outlet reported.
Virginio Murillo, director of the Kolbe Foundation, which runs the prison, refused to comment to the Independent on the conditions and denied reporters access.
