Update: Jan. 19, 2021
The young Georgia woman who was jailed for just over a month in the Cayman Islands for knowingly violating coronavirus restrictions said “I deserved it,” according to media reports.
Speaking to ABC News, Skylar Mack, 18, a student from Loganville, Georgia, admitted to flouting the Caribbean territory’s mandatory two-week quarantine period during a November visit.
“The anger, the disappointment — it’s all justified,” she said. “I deserved it. I was like, ‘You know what? I made this mistake, and it sucks, but you did it to yourself.”
“I mean, it was a conscious decision of being like, you know what — but I also was just… I don’t — I can’t give you a good reason for it,” Mack said.
Mack, a Mercer University pre-med student, arrived on the island on Nov. 27 and was required to quarantine under Caymanian COVID restriction measures. Two days later, she removed her GPS bracelet and went to watch her boyfriend, Vanjae Ramgeet, 24, a professional jet-ski racer from the Cayman Islands, compete in an event.
The pair was originally sentenced to four months each in jail, 40 hours of community service and $2,600 in fines. The sentences were eventually reduced to two months each. Both served 32 days before they were released last week, Fox News reported.
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Update: Dec. 22, 2020
Skylar Mack, a Georgia teenager who was imprisoned in the Cayman Islands earlier this month for breaking COVID-19 protocols, had her jail sentence reduced from four months to two months by an appeals court Tuesday, the Cayman Compass reports.
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Dec. 17, 2020
CAYMAN ISLANDS — An 18-year-old college student from Georgia and her watersports-athlete boyfriend were sentenced to four months by a Cayman Island court after she slipped out of her wristband monitor to watch him compete at a local race instead of quarantining upon arrival from the U.S., according to local reports.
Skylar Mack and her boyfriend, Cayman Islands-based competitive Jet Skier Vanjae Ramgeet were jailed immediately upon hearing their fate on Tuesday. An island judge issued the four-month term after overturning a previous sentence of 40 hours of community service and a $2,600 fine each, according to a report from the Cayman News Service.
“This was as flagrant a breach as could be imagined,” Grand Court Justice Roger Chapple told the court, according to the Cayman Compass. “It was borne of selfishness and arrogance.”
Moreover, the judge issued the same punishment for Ramgeet, a local man who the jurist said should have been smarter, Fox News reported.
Mack allegedly violated the quarantine requirements just two days after arriving at the Cayman Islands in late November. After asking government officials to loosen a wristband monitor that she said was too tight, she allegedly slipped out of the equipment and went to Ramgeet’s Jet Ski competition for hours, according to the reports.
She allegedly exposed four families, who were then required to quarantine. It was not immediately clear if Mack or the four families tested positive for the coronavirus.
Posted by Skylar Mack on Monday, August 10, 2020
“This was entirely deliberate and planned, as evidenced by her desire to switch her wristband the day before to a looser one that she was then able to remove,” Chapple said Tuesday.
Mack, a University of Georgia medical student, will be deported as soon as she’s served the required time, the reports state, and court officials asked that she be banned from returning to the country until the border reopens.
