By Belize Live News Staff: The search warrant conversation usually starts with a denial. In a Boca Del Rio apartment on Tuesday morning, it started with directions.
The Belize Police Department reports that an inspector and a detective arrived at a third floor apartment in the area at about 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, August 4, 2026, informing the occupant that a search for firearms, drugs, and ammunition was about to happen. Asked first whether he had anything illegal to declare, the man, identified through his driver’s licence as Devan Tristan Paulino, 25, self-employed, of the Boca Del Rio Area, pointed the way himself: some weed, he said, in a transparent bag under the table beside his bed.
The table gave up precisely that. Inside the bag sat wrapped green leafy substance suspected to be cannabis, and the honest answer met the law’s arithmetic at the station scale: 232.9 grams, nearly a quarter kilo, a quantity that moved the matter from simple possession into possession with intent to supply to another.
The rest of the apartment held nothing further, and the process that followed was meticulous, rights explained and signed, the scale demonstrated before the weighing in his presence, the envelope sealed with evidence tape and signed by Paulino himself as witness. By day’s end the formal charge was laid, and he answered the final caution with silence.
Paulino, as with anyone charged, is presumed innocent unless and until the court rules otherwise.
Candour at the door may yet count for something where such things are weighed, but the scale answers only one question, and 232.9 grams answered it loudly. The island’s drug ledger keeps filling this season, the kilo under the old fridge, the half gram in the school bag pocket, and now the quarter kilo under the bedside table, and the pattern beneath it all is simple: San Pedro’s police are knocking, and the hiding spots keep coming up short.
