Morgan family to learn fate on April 9

A Pastor and his family, charged with burning a Prospect man with hot water, will have to wait until April 9 to see if their tears and story will have washed their alleged sins away.

Nigel, Althea and Crystal Morgan are charged with inflicting grievous bodily harm on Cuthbert ‘Mafia’ Victory of Prospect on April 9, 2016. It is the first time the three have told their story in a public setting since they were charged.

There is, however, a 54 second video, linked to the three, which appears to show Victory being held down and a significant quantity of water from a kettle being poured on him. The video was shared extensively on social media.

The pastor, Nigel Morgan, was the first to take the stand last Friday, where he recalled that on the day in question, he had been speaking to someone near his Marriaqua home, when Victory started cursing him, using “expletives, like rain.”

A little while later, waiting for a van to Lauders, Nigel Morgan observed Victory at a neighbour’s house, wrapping what looked like ganja. “He. Looked. Boooozed,” the pastor stressed, nodding his head and whispering.

He said the complainant started playing songs from Kartel and Movado, with words like “up in ah your punany, up in ah your belly”, but there were “too much f’s for me to continue that song,” he said.

There were young children living in the house where the complainant was sitting, he said, and because of this, he asked the stepfather to speak to Victory about the words in his music.

Victory started cursing him again, he said, saying things like “you want me to f-u-*-k”, he recalled, with his forehead crinkled and his eyes closed.

“The Blood of Jesus,” Morgan had proclaimed with his hands above his head, while Victory continued, “Your wife lower she dignity fuh marry you.”

In Althea Morgan’s deposition, she stated, that when she heard this, although just an observer up until this point, she said from their porch “Leave me out of dat.” She left and went across the road, “Mafia (Victory), you and me are family and you always leave where you live and come to make mischief.”

She said to a supposedly cursing Victory, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” after which Victory apparently gave her a strange look and left the neighbour’s porch. She said her husband warned him that if he came up by them he would anoint him with oil and pray for him.

Victory then apparently spit in front and beside her when she was praying, and gave her one “stink slap”.

Supposedly giving someone a phone to film, Victory then approached her husband, she said.

Victory slapped a bottle of oil out of the pastor’s hand and began boxing him, Althea said.

She said that when she tried to push Victory, he pulled her and they all ended up in the gutter. She had pinned her husband down in the beginning

when they fell, while Victory had grabbed her hair.

Althea claims that when she was in the gutter, Mafia dragged her for 10 feet. She said her husband was busy trying to push Victory off her and all of a sudden she felt that the hold on her hair was released.

Althea said in questioning that she never saw her daughter, and she did not see what had happened, but found out after the fact. Likewise, the pastor did not mention a kettle or hot water, saying that in his haziness after hitting his head, he did not know what had happened, but admitted he felt the burn on his hand afterwards.

Crystal Morgan, who spoke in a soft voice at the beginning of her deposition and broke down in the middle, said that she had heard the commotion, but chose not to go out. She was apparently making a cup of tea, when she heard her father say to bring the oil. She didn’t go. “I don’t like confrontation,” she said, breaking down.

When she went to take the kettle off the stand she heard the sound of tinkling glass. She said it felt like her “soul left her body” and she found herself down the stairs and going towards the fighting.

Afraid that her parents would be injured, and feeling the weight in her hand, she said she poured only a little bit of the water in the kettle on Victory’s backpack. She said when she realized she would be hurting him, she stopped quickly.

During questioning prosecutor Adolphus Delplesche was intent on showing that the trio was lying.

“As a Christian, one of the duties of a Christian is to accept responsibility when wrong,” he stated, also putting it to the family numerous times that they were not telling the truth.

Notably, the trio adamantly denied planning, in any way, to pour the boiling water on Victory, with Nigel Morgan saying that a previous witness who had stated that he and his wife had held Victory down ‘was lying’.

Written submissions are to be made by the prosecutor and defence lawyer Kay Bacchus-Baptiste and a decision made on April 9 before the Kingstown Magistrate’s Court.