KUALA LUMPUR: The investigating officer (IO) tasked to investigate the death of Ivana Esther Robert Smit, the Dutch model who was found sprawled on the sixth floor of a condominium here in 2017, was ticked off by the Coroner’s Court here today.
Coroner Mahyon Talib said the IO, Assistant Superintendent Faizal Abdullah, could have done a better job by reclassifying the case from sudden death report (SDR) and opening an investigation paper (IP) into the model’s death.
“It cannot be disputed that the police from Dang Wangi police district headquarters did not open any IP and classified the case as SDR.
“Faizal knew that Alex Johnson and Luna Almaz were the last persons together with the victim in a house at level 20 before she was found dead on the sixth floor.
“He, however, decided to treat the case as a SDR rather than open an IP.
“He could have taken more evidence...why didn’t he do this?” she said in her written judgement on the inquest of the death of Smit.
Smit, who was at the home of Johnson and Almaz, was allegedly partying with the couple before she plunged to her death.
Her naked body was found on a sixth floor balcony at about 10am.
Smit, who had dual Dutch and Belgian citizenship, was the second runners-up in the Malaysia Supermodel Search 2014, when she was 15 years old.
Mahyon said the police should have checked the unit for any alcoholic drinks and so on and passed this to the forensics department for analysis and DNA testing.
“This was not done,” she said, adding that Faizal also failed to interrogate the couple (Johnson and Almaz) despite their inconsistency when giving statements on Dec 7, 2017.
“The couple also failed to return to the country to testify in the inquest after they fled the country as police concluded they were innocent.”
The court also criticised pathologist Dr Nurliza Abdullah who failed to go to the scene and assumed Smit’s cause of death based on pictures of the scene provided by police.
“She become defensive when she was trapped on the issue that she did not go to the scene and stated that her statement was made based on police pictures only,” she said.
The mystery of the death of Smit was finally solved today when the coroner said the 19-year-old died due to misadventure.
She said there was no clear evidence of any criminal element nor involvement of any individual in the case.