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Thursday, April 3, 2025

Musician drops threat of legal action against SDA Church

by

83 days ago
20250111
Lead guitarist of Freetown Collective, Lou Lyons.

Lead guitarist of Freetown Collective, Lou Lyons.

DEREK ACHONG

Se­nior Re­porter

derek.achong@guardian.co.tt

Mu­si­cian and so­cial jus­tice ac­tivist Lou Lyons is sat­is­fied with the re­sponse of the South Caribbean Con­fer­ence of Sev­enth-day Ad­ven­tists to him af­ter he was im­pli­cat­ed in the mur­der of spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor Ran­dall Hec­tor af­ter at­tend­ing a church ser­vice.

Ear­li­er this week, Lyons’ lawyer Joel Rop­er is­sued a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter threat­en­ing a defama­tion law­suit if he was not giv­en an ex­pla­na­tion and a pub­lic apol­o­gy.

On Thurs­day, the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s pres­i­dent Pas­tor Leslie Moses is­sued a press re­lease ex­tend­ing sym­pa­thy to Lyons.

Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, Rop­er con­firmed that Lyons was sat­is­fied with the re­lease and would no longer be seek­ing to pur­sue lit­i­ga­tion over the is­sue.

Short­ly af­ter Hec­tor was shot and killed while leav­ing a ser­vice at the Stan­more Av­enue SDA Church in Port-of-Spain on De­cem­ber 31, 2024, an im­age of Lyons in the church was shared on so­cial me­dia.

The im­age of Lyons had an ac­com­pa­ny­ing cap­tion al­leg­ing that he was not known to the con­gre­ga­tion, was seen tex­ting and speak­ing on his cell phone, and was seen walk­ing in the di­rec­tion Hec­tor was in when he (Hec­tor) was at­tacked.

Lyons threat­ened le­gal ac­tion as he claimed that his per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al rep­u­ta­tion was tar­nished by the wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed post.

He claimed that the post jeop­ar­dised “very im­por­tant” cor­po­rate spon­sor­ship deals which he and his band Free­town Col­lec­tion were in the process of ne­go­ti­at­ing.

Hec­tor’s fu­ner­al took place at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the South­ern Caribbean (USC) in Mara­cas, St Joseph, on Thurs­day.


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