NCU lecturer remanded in Florida on sexual assault, burglary charges | Loop Jamaica

Black Immigrant Daily News

A senior lecturer at Northern Caribbean University (NCU) in Mandeville, Manchester remains in police custody in Florida, United States following his extradition from Jamaica on Thursday to face sexual battery charges dating back to the mid-1990s, in Margate, Florida.

Russell McLean, 65, is being held in a Broward County jail without bail on 16 charges, including sexual assault, burglary and kidnapping.

According to Local10 News in Florida, McLean, a behavioural and social sciences lecturer at NCU, was arrested in May of this year in Jamaica after a determined police investigator in Florida reopened a probe into a string of armed sexual batteries there decades ago.

Investigators alleged that McLean would “break into homes and threaten victims with a gun in order to assault them”, the report said.

Two of the crimes occurred in the city of Margate between June 1996 and November 1997.

The investigations into the incidents hit a snag because although victims gave the same description of the suspect, law enforcers had few leads into who the attacker was, or his whereabouts.

But on an unspecified date in 2007, evidence in a burglary case led to the identification of McLean as a person of interest.

Still, “the ongoing investigation failed to further implicate him,” the report said, adding that McLean eventually fled to Jamaica once he learnt that he was being investigated for that crime and others.

Determined not to shutter the cases, Detective Julio Fernandez reopened a probe into the incidents in 2015.

The officer managed to obtain “DNA evidence and compared it to DNA located in rape kits from 1996”, Local10 News reported.

It added that, “The results were conclusive that McLean’s DNA was a match”.

At that point, however, McLean’s whereabouts in Jamaica were still unknown to Florida law enforcement authorities.

An arrest warrant implicating the lecturer with multiple counts of armed sexual battery, armed kidnapping and armed burglary, was issued for McLean in 2020.

He was tracked down and arrested in Jamaica on May 24, 2022, and extradited on Thursday of this week after giving consent to be removed from the island without a challenge to the warrant, to the United States to answer to the charges.

With the Martgate Police Department suspecting that there may possibly be more victims stemming from McLean’s alleged criminal acts, victims or persons with relevant information are being asked to contact the department at (954) 972-7111.

NewsAmericasNow.com