More on my revelation about Shernell Pierre

As you may know, on Sunday I posted some interesting things I heard about Shernell Sharon Pierre, who (it now is revealed) was shot before being placed in her car and set on fire. Specifically I noted that I had heard:

First off, Pierre is from St. Vincent, the Caribbean island. Apparently after moving to Canada she entered in a relationship with a Jamaican man who turned out to be already married to another woman.

Pierre apparently brought her new husband home two weeks ago. Now she's dead. Anybody want to bet more thant $0.15 that Shernell Sharon Pierre was murdered by this Jamaican man? I thought not.

So far there have been three interesting comments regarding that entry. I will address the second one first. Anonymous writes:

i call that report malicious and i dont believe you have a inside scoop and if your scoop is so reliable you should inform police instead of using the internet to spread rumors trying to distroy people intigrity

This sounds like quite the damning statement until you remember that I didn't name the person. I simply put forward what I had heard and made a guess. At work on Friday people were surmising that Pierre was killed by an ex-boyfriend, so this isn't exactly an unheard-of proposition (see White, Liana). Meanwhile, my scoop is being discounted as unreliable whilst somehow fingering this Jamaican man who must exist, therefore confirming much of what I said as being at least moderately reliable. It can't be both ways: either I'm just talking nonsense or I've got at least a kernel of truth. If the claim is that I'm fingering an unnamed man, then it has to be the latter. As for the informing police suggestion, I'll get to that in a moment.

Now lets examine the first and third comments, also from "Anonymous" (I assume all three are different anonymouses):

Hi there,

I'm a reporter at CTV News in Edmonton. I was just reading your comments and wondering where you heard this information about Shernell Pierre.

Please give me a call. You can speak anonymously if you want. But I think this kind of information will help police and should be known.

My cell number is (deleted)

Hi,

I am a reporter with the Edmonton Sun. I would also like to speak with you about Shernell Pierre.

Even if you're not interested in speaking on the record, please e-mail me at (deleted)

Now when the first one was posted, my first thought was that this "CTV Reporter" was actually somebody connected with our "innocent Jamaican man" trying to get personal information out of me and find out who knew what. For all I knew, calling that number would get me in a nice burning car of my own. [I deleted both the phone number and the email from the quoted comments in this post, even though they occur in the original comments. This will prevent excessive spam or prank calling, in theory at least. -ed] The second posting, this time with an Edmonton SUN email address rather than a phone number makes me less likely to believe the first post to be malicious: this is an actual first/last name connected to the newspaper. (Note though that there's no appeal to inform the police or asking where I'd heard the story).

I'll summarize here for the sake of other reporters who might want details: the information I brought forward in the original post is the extent of the information I know. If I knew more, I'd have said more (including the dude's name). This is the extent of the scoop, and for that I'm sorry. I don't have the suspect's name, I can't go get you his home address and a photograph of his car (or white van, as the case may be...). Now as reporters, maybe these two have already done this, but from this couldn't it be easy to determine using the resources of the MSM:

1. Whether Pierre was from the island of St. Vincent
2. If she recently was married there
3. If her friends knew of a Jamaican ex-boyfriend

If it turns out the answer to any of these (or all) is "no", then you can discard what you read on this blog. If the answers are yes, then the police can be asked (on and off the record) some more pressing questions regarding this "person of interest" who owns the white Dodge van. In any case, the answers to questions about Shernell Sharon Pierre will not be coming from Third Edge of the Sword beyond what has already been revealed. I just don't knows no more.

Update, April 1 2012 1:27pm: Well, we have certainly had a lot verified since 2008. The name "Devon Hugh Saunders" which you'll see in the comments below is a name the police were interested enough in that they actually arrested him for the crime, which makes sense since his own family are aware that he did it and some of the details.