The mother of murdered toddler Alissady Powell has welcomed an independent examination of the first police investigation into the 2-year-old’s death.

Yvané Dixon said she hoped the inquiry ordered by Commissioner of Police Kurt Walton, to be held in November and led by a UK-based expert on child deaths, would make sure no other parent would have to endure what she did.

Dixon said she believed it would lead to “other parties being held responsible for the way this investigation had initially begun because there was a lot of … for want of a better word, mistakes and it was not treated as it should have been from the get-go”.

The pathologist in the first inquiry found that Alissady, who was reported missing from the Cayman Brac home she shared with her mother and her then-boyfriend Devon Emmanuel Wright Jr., 34, in 2022, had drowned after her lifeless body was found on the ironshore a short distance from the apartment.

But it was later ruled the toddler had died from compression to the neck and that other injuries, including to her head, could not be explained away as accidental.

Dixon said, “I’m just really hoping that awareness is raised when it comes to the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service and to the pathologist [about] where they went wrong and how this could have been handled from the very beginning.”

She added, “I do hope that the policing will become better.”

Dixon said that she knows that the police do their work.

“But at the same time, being in the position I was in, it made it feel very much that they were just sitting back collecting a paycheck and that Alissady’s case was just put on the back burner.”

Dixon added that the first investigation under then-Commissioner of Police Derek Byrne, was “not handled correctly”.

“So I am grateful for Kurt Walton and the newly appointed team and that they listened to me,” she said. “They made me feel heard. They did not treat my daughter as if she was just some paperwork or a case.”

The inquiry was ordered after Wright Jr., then the boyfriend of Dixon, was found not guilty of the little girl’s murder by a Grand Court jury.

But jurors convicted him of abduction of the child from her home on Cayman Brac’s South Side Road overnight on 25 July 2022.

But Crown counsel Jonas Hankin, KC, highlighted during Wright’s trial that Dixon had engaged a US forensics expert at her own expense to examine the evidence.

The US forensics expert ruled that Alissady had died because her neck had been compressed and that there was no evidence of drowning.

The findings sparked a re-examination of the case by UK Home Office specialists, which led to Wright being charged with abduction and murder in July, 2025 – three years after Alissady vanished from her home.

Dr. Brett Lockyer, a Home Office-approved forensic pathologist, told the court he and another UK expert, a child pathologist, had agreed the child had died because her neck had been compressed.

He added that a pattern of injuries and bruises on the child’s head and face could not be explained away as accidental.

Dixon said, “I don’t feel that justice has been 100% fully served, but I am grateful that we did get a guilty verdict on one charge and it has been a long time coming.

“This has been such a long journey and such a very painful and heart-breaking one, while having to go through this and also trying to heal.

“I’ve also had to make peace with the fact that, no matter what the verdict is, my daughter is gone and I’m never going to see her again.”

Wright will be sentenced next month for the abduction, as well as for a string of unrelated crimes, including firearms and drugs offences.