A fifth American woman was caught in the Turks and Caicos Islands recently for having guns in her bag. On Thursday, she was fined $1,500, and her 23-week sentence was put on hold, the court told CBS News. Sharitta Grier, a grandmother from Florida, took a surprise trip to the British territory for Mother’s Day. As she was trying to get home, police found two guns in her carry-on bag and arrested her.
She told reporters Thursday after her punishment hearing that when she got back to Orlando, one of the first things she’d do was hug her family and eat some soul food.
Grier said before she left the islands Thursday afternoon, “I’m just excited about everything and ready to get back home to my family and my grandkids.” “It’s been a long time coming, but God is still good.” During this whole trip, I’ve seen God’s hand at work, so I’m happy.
She said that while she was on the islands for a week, people fed her, gave her a place to stay, and helped her.
“It was like strangers reaching out at me and like just blessing me out of nowhere, so I could really see the hand of God,” she shared.
She told CBS News that she had to spend a few nights in jail after being arrested in mid-May.
“They made me chained to a chair by my leg,” she told Kris Van Cleave, a senior transportation reporter for CBS News. “It’s cold, scary, it was awful, it was so awful, I couldn’t sleep.”
After being freed from jail, Grier had to stay on the islands because she could face jail time while her case went through the courts.
“You have good days, bad days — mentally draining, like not knowing what’s going to happen or when it’s going to happen, if a court date’s going to be pushed back,” Van Cleave told her last month. “It’s a lot, it’s a lot mentally.”
She was hopeful about her case because other Americans who were caught with guns in their bags didn’t go to jail but had to pay fines before they could come back to the U.S.
Over 20 rifle rounds that were in Bryan Hagerich’s bag when he got back from holiday in May, he was given a suspended sentence and fined $6,700. After a few days, Tyler Wenrich of Virginia was given time served and a $9,000 fine for having two 9 mm bullets in his backpack while trying to get on a cruise ship.
Four rounds of ammo were found in Oklahoma man Ryan Watson’s carry-on bag when he and his wife visited British Guiana earlier this year. He was given a suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine last month. The punishment of Michael Lee Evans from Texas was also put on hold while his case was being heard. He was allowed to come back to the U.S. for medical reasons.
The five Americans could have been given the required minimum prison terms of 12 years. Because politicians in the U.S. wanted the islands to be more lenient toward Americans, they changed the law to give judges more freedom in sentencing gun cases.
