Alric Lindsay 
Prosecution says Devon Emmanuel Wright Jr was “awake and outside” when two-year-old Allisady Powell vanished; defence says the circumstantial case is riddled with unanswered questions
By Alric Lindsay
Prosecution and defence counsel delivered their closing speeches in the Grand Court today, August 10, 2026, in the murder trial of Devon Emmanuel Wright Jr, who is accused of the murder and abduction of two-year-old Allisady Powell, the child who disappeared from a Cayman Brac apartment in the early hours of July 26, 2022, and was found dead on the ironshore.
In sharply contrasting addresses to the jury before Justice Peters, Jonas Hankin, KC, for the Crown, urged the jury to be sure that only Wright could have killed the child, while defence counsel, Stan Reiz, KC, argued that the case is built entirely on circumstantial evidence that points in several directions and leaves too many questions unanswered to convict.
In particular, defence counsel highlighted that there were no eyewitnesses to what happened, no CCTV of the child leaving the apartment or reaching the shore, and no forensic evidence identifying who was responsible. The pathology evidence could not establish exactly when or where the child died. The prosecution’s case rests on circumstantial evidence — the dispute is over what that evidence is capable of proving.
The Crown’s case: “awake and outside”
For the Crown, Hankin KC told the jury the prosecution case rested on two strengths: evidence that allowed the jury to reject the realistic alternatives, and evidence pointing directly to Wright.
Hankin KC argued that whoever reached a sleeping child behind a locked door could only have done so with a lost key or with help from inside. He added that the evidence excluded the two other adults who were in the apartment that night.
The child’s mother, the Crown said, could not realistically be the killer. After the death was first treated as a drowning — a conclusion that left her under no suspicion — she refused to accept it, went to the press, wrote to the Deputy Governor, and commissioned and paid for a forensic medical review of her own initiative. When that review concluded the child had been unlawfully killed, she handed it to police the same day, setting in motion the very murder investigation that followed. Her conduct in the aftermath, Hankin KC said, was “entirely inconsistent with her being the murderer.” Physical traces in the apartment — two damp nappies and a wet pair of leggings — supported her account of getting up in the night to change a living child.
Wright’s cousin, asleep on the sofa, could likewise be excluded, the Crown submitted; whatever small inconsistencies there were in her account, the evidence placed the child alive and well at a later check.
Turning to Wright, Hankin said that during the period in which the child disappeared, “Devon Wright was awake and outside” — the only adult, on any account, who was up and out of the apartment. On his own account he saw no stranger, heard no vehicle and heard nothing of anyone removing a doorbell camera from a neighbouring unit or moving toward the shoreline.
The Crown pointed to evidence about sweat: reportedly, the mother said she smelled Wright’s body odour — the way he smelled “after exertion” — in the child’s bedroom and nowhere else, while a neighbour who saw him by the cars at about 5.30 a.m. described him as “glistening,” like a man who had worked out but was no longer actively sweating. An act of killing, Hankin KC suggested, is likely to have involved physical effort and stress.
Hankin KC also drew attention to remarks Wright had volunteered to police that the child could unlock the front door herself and could climb the steps toward the ironshore. Allegedly, this would seem to support the theory that the child wandered out and drowned. However, the evidence showed she did not drown.
On intent, the Crown said the evidence was of forceful compression of a child’s neck, sustained for minutes rather than seconds, with an abrasion consistent with the child’s own fingernail suggesting she was conscious and struggling. Considered as a whole, he told the jury, the evidence proved that “Devon Wright murdered Allisady Powell,” and the proper verdict on the murder count was guilty.
The defence: a circumstantial case that “points in various directions”
For the defence, Reiz KC explained that this was a case with so little evidence to explain what happened and it was difficult to know what the jury could be sure about — and a serious allegation should never be decided on guesswork. “This isn’t a murder mystery that you might watch on Netflix,” he said.
Circumstantial evidence, he argued, can be compelling but is not always convincing, and can point in several directions at once. To convict, the jury had to be sure it could exclude every realistic innocent explanation — and it was wrong, he said, for the prosecution to “cherry pick” the parts that fit its theory.
He placed weight on the absence of any motive. After four years of investigation, he said, the prosecution had failed to identify any reason why Wright would harm the child; the evidence, in fact, pointed in another direction.
Reiz KC stressed that the burden of proof lay entirely on the Crown, whose case depended on proving that no one else could have been responsible. Reiz KC identified what he called holes in that case.
For example, at least one other key to the apartment had gone missing and had never been recovered. To dismiss it because no one could prove the killer had used it, Reiz KC said, “misses the point”: it meant there was another means of entry that could not be excluded.
The core of the defence was timing and opportunity. The only real distinction between Wright and the other two occupants, Reiz KC said, was that he was outside — smoking — when the alarm was raised.
Reiz KC challenged the prosecution’s treatment of the timeline. The mother had said consistently that she last changed the child at about 4.30 a.m., a time she was sure of because she checked the large clock in her kitchen; only once, in the flustered 911 call, had she estimated it might have been closer to two hours earlier. The Crown, he said, was now inviting the jury to treat that single panicked guess as more reliable than everything she had said since, and to undermine its own witness — because her 4.30 a.m. account left too little time for Wright to be the killer.
On the distance, the defence pointed to a police officer’s timed walk of about 12 minutes each way at a moderate pace along the road for a round trip of some 1.4 miles. He added that this walk would take longer if done over the ironshore and barefoot.
To have killed the child by sustained neck compression, which takes several minutes, then carried her body seven-tenths of a mile over the ironshore in the dark during a storm and returned unseen, all within the narrow window available, was, Reiz KC submitted, effectively impossible. If the aim had been to fake a drowning, he asked, why carry the child so far when a pool was seconds away? And when the mother saw Wright moments after the door slammed, he “wasn’t out of breath, and he wasn’t wet” — despite the theory that he had just run the ironshore to leave a body in the water.
Reiz KC also questioned the behaviour the prosecution’s theory required: that a guilty man would switch on the bathroom light and wake the child’s mother, then slam the front door to wake her a second time and ensure she discovered the child missing while he was outside. That, he said, was not how a person in that position would behave. Throughout, the defence said, it pointed the finger at no one; the question was only whether the Crown had made the jury sure.
What happens next
Closing speeches having now been made, Justice Peters will give a summation on August 11, 2026. Following this, the jury will retire to consider its verdict.
