An 18-year-old American college student who broke the mandatory 14-day quarantine protocol for visitors to the Cayman Islands has returned home.
After spending a month behind bars in the Cayman Islands, Skylar Mack arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta after her release from prison, ABC affiliate KABC-TV reported.
According to the news station, when asked how she felt about coming home, Mack said: “Very excited. Happy to be home.”
Mack, a pre-med student from Georgia, traveled to the Cayman Islands on Nov. 27 to visit her boyfriend, 24-year-old Vanjae Ramgeet, for a jet-skiing competition. Mack said she isolated for two days and tested negative for Covid-19 before abandoning her tracking device and breaking the mandatory quarantine to attend her boyfriend’s competition.
Mack and Ramgeet were each initially sentenced to 40 hours of community service and a $2,600 fine after pleading guilty to violating Covid-19 protocols, but an appeals judge sentenced the duo to a stricter sentence for their “selfishness and arrogance,” the Cayman Compass reported.
Her family appealed to President Donald Trump for help after she was sentenced to four months in prison, which was later reduced to two months.
Last month, Jonathan Hughes, the lawyer for the couple, told NBC News the two were incredibly sorry for their actions.
“They both expressed genuine remorse, a genuine appreciation for the seriousness of what had taken place, a genuine appeal for some form of forgiveness,” Hughes said.
Hughes said laws in the Cayman Islands allow people who serve 60 percent of their sentence that is less than a year to be released on conditional release. The couple was expected to be released mid-January, he said at the time.
On her granddaughter’s return, Jeanne told KABC-TV that she was going to get a better night’s sleep.
“It’s kind of hard to fall asleep when someone you love so much you know that they’re not sleeping, and that they’re uncomfortable and I know she’s a tough girl but she had to be scared,” Jeanne said.
According to the government’s Covid-19 dashboard, the Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory in the Caribbean with almost 65,000 people, has reported 380 cases and 2 deaths.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
