Arizona man fined $22,000 at Barbados High Court over pistol found at airport

Jackson Bart Randall, 47, pleaded guilty after a .380 Colt pistol and ammunition were discovered in his luggage at Grantley Adams Airport. He paid $22,000 in fines to avoid four years in prison.

Arizona man settles $22,000 firearm fine at Barbados High Court

An American man caught with an unlicensed pistol and ammunition in his checked luggage has paid $22,000 in court-ordered fines, Barbados Today reports.

Jackson Bart Randall, 47, of Lake Havasu, Arizona, appeared before Justice Carlisle Greaves in the No. 3 Supreme Court on Tuesday and entered a guilty plea. He had been arrested on 14 September after a .380 automatic Colt pistol and seven rounds of ammunition were found in his baggage at Grantley Adams International Airport.

Justice Greaves began with a ten-year custodial sentence and then applied deductions — one-third for the guilty plea and a further two years for mitigating factors. Concluding that a financial penalty would adequately serve the interests of justice, he ordered Randall to pay $15,000 for the unlicensed firearm and $7,000 for the ammunition. Both sums were required immediately; failure to pay would have resulted in four years' imprisonment at Dodds Prison. The fines were paid in full.

Acting Senior State Counsel Anastacia Mcmeo-Boyce told the court that airport security officers, scanning checked baggage, spotted a firearm inside a black duffel bag that was booked onto an American Airlines flight bound for Miami. The operations manager was alerted and the police were called.

Randall was then invited to identify and open the bag. When officers noticed the weapon in the bag's front pocket and asked who it belonged to, he replied: "It is my gun, but I don't know how it got into the bag."

Senior Counsel Andrew Pilgrim and attorney Summer Hassell represented Randall in the proceedings.

Source: Barbados Today