Beauty queen burnt by police flash grenade walks after ice charges

A BEAUTY queen and law student whose face was burned when a police flash grenade exploded during a drug raid has walked free from court for helping her then-fiance in the supply of ice.

Felicia D’Jamirze before and after the grenade explosion.

A BEAUTY queen and law student whose face was burned when a police flash grenade exploded during a drug raid has walked free from court for helping her then-fiance in the supply of ice.

Felicia D’Jamirze, 29, who was Miss Global Australia in 2014 and Miss International Australia in 2013, was in the Supreme Court in Brisbane today where she was sentenced by Justice Peter Flanagan to three years wholly suspended.

She pleaded guilty to supplying ice on October 31 in a deal with prosecutors to drop a charge of producing ice.

Former Beauty Queen Felicia D'Jamirze was sentenced to three years, wholly suspended. Picture: Lachie Millard

She was initially charged with trafficking in ice between November 2015 and February 2016, and with production of the drug, but the trafficking charge was dropped in December last year.

The court heard that D’Jamirze, a social sciences student, had set up kitchen scales and weighed two grams of artificial sweetener before her fiance used the scales to weigh 400 grams of ice.

She later cleaned the scales with disinfectant.

Crown prosecutor Ron Swanwick told the court that D’Jamirze “knew what she was doing” although her role was small compared to that of her fiance.

“By doing that she cannot complain about the collateral damage that occurred during her arrest,” Mr Swanwick told the court.

He said police considered her fiance so dangerous that they needed to use stun grenades when they raided his acreage home in Susan River, near Hervey Bay, on February 9 last year.

She spent three months in hospital after the police grenade burned her face.

During her recovery in hospital in Sydney Ms D’Jamirze appeared on A Current Affair where she told viewers: “I could feel that this side of my face was burning. I thought that I was on fire.

“I felt like my hair was on fire and I was scared that another one was going to hit me and I was screaming out ‘Please stop, I’m hurt’,” she told A Current Affair.

Her fiance Dean Grant O’Donnell, 37, who was the main target of the police operation, is due to be sentenced for ice trafficking next week.

Two kilograms of ice and a “pump action shotgun”, and a handgun and silencer were allegedly found on land adjoining his property.

Police cameras hidden in the home also allegedly captured Ms D’Jamirze snorting cocaine but she was not charged with any offences related to cocaine.

D’Jamirze’s barrister Bruce Walmsley QC, from Melbourne, told the court that D’Jamirze’s injuries were “abating in the physical sense” but she has a “residual imperfection in her cornea” of her right eye, as well as reduced strength in her right hand.

Mr Walmsley told the court that D’Jamirze dumped O’Donnell shortly after their arrest.

“He has rung her, and he has been informed the relationship is over, they haven’t been in each others company since the day of the arrest,” Mr Walmsley told the court.