Skylar Mack, the American university student who was arrested in the Cayman Islands last month for violating coronavirus restrictions, said in an interview on Tuesday that she “deserved it”.
In a segment that aired on ABC’s “Good Morning America” program, Mack, 18, apologized for breaking the rules and said that any anger against her was justified. She was released on Friday after spending more than a month behind bars.
“I deserved it,” she said. “I was like, ‘You know what, I made that mistake, and it sucks, you know, but you did it yourself.'”
After finishing her semester at Mercer University in Georgia in late November, Ms. Mack flew to the Cayman Islands to watch her boyfriend, Vanjae Ramgeet, 24, compete in the national Jet Ski racing championship on the islands.
She arrived on a Friday and was negative for the coronavirus. While British law required her to stay in her hotel room for 14 days, on Sunday, the day of the championship, she removed the electronic monitoring bracelet from her wrist. She went to the beach and cheered for Mr. Ramgeet when he won first place.
In mid-December, a Cayman Islands court sentenced Mack and Ramgeet to four months in prison. After protests that the punishment was too severe, a panel of judges reduced the sentence to two months. His release after just over half that time was in line with what his lawyer, Jonathon Hughes, expected. (Under Cayman Islands law, he said, defendants need to serve only 60% of their prison sentences.)
She was one of thousands of people around the world who were punished for violating quarantine restrictions. Extensive travel restrictions have failed to stop the virus from spreading, with some people seeing themselves as above the rules.
Ms. Mack told “Good Morning America” that if she had made someone sick, she would not be able to live with herself.
Ramgeet was also released on Friday, according to Skylar’s grandmother Jeanne Mack, who said last month that her granddaughter struggled with prison.
“It’s been one heartache after another,” said Jeanne Mack. “She is bored, she has nothing to do there. She doesn’t want to sit in the common area and watch TV because the Cayman Islands news continues to spread pictures of her everywhere. ”
Jeanne Mack said she was concerned that her granddaughter’s scholarship at Mercer, where she was a junior pre-medical student, could be withdrawn because she missed the first few weeks of the semester while in prison. A Mercer spokesman, Kyle Sears, said on Monday that Skylar Mack was not registered for the spring semester and declined to comment further.