THE CONVICTION of Jamaican-born Lee Boyd Malvo on murder charges in the United States last Thursday is a poignant lesson on a teenager's life gone awry. It also highlighted the many ironies in this unhappy saga of a breakdown in a family unit, a mother's struggle for economic survival and a talented youngster's desire for parental direction.
Consider, for example, the consensus in the testimonies of parents, classmates and former school teachers in Jamaica and Antigua that Lee Boyd Malvo was an obedient, talented youngster, yearning for a father figure.
In the complex and many-layered chapters of this tragedy are the reports that Malvo's biological father had made some attempts to provide for his son after he sought employment in the Cayman Islands. The extent of that help has been disputed by the boy's mother.
That Malvo should come under the influence of the apparently unstable yet charismatic John Muhammad, is one of those ironic twists of fate that many people who knew the Jamaican teenager would want to reverse and erase, were that possible.
Among the ironies too is that the meeting and connection with Muhammad should have come about as a result of his mother, Una James, struggling valiantly, though not always legally, to provide a better life for herself and her son as she moved about the Caribbean and then to the United States. Consider that even as Malvo's lawyer argued temporary insanity, the teenager made sketches on note pads showing a latent artistic talent that properly harnessed could have carved different path in his life.
Yet even as we feel the pain of that particular family because of our own cultural ties, we cannot overlook the fact that Malvo was convicted because the jury in the United States accepted the evidence and arguments of the prosecution, that he was linked to the deaths of one or more of the 10 people allegedly shot dead by the sniper pair.
Among the 10 was a Jamaican. None of them knew or had reason to fear Muhammad or Malvo. None of them had reason to be looking over their shoulders as they went about their business in shopping malls or petrol service stations in different cities in the United States. All fell victim to an unknown killer. For their families, conviction and perhaps capital punishment is the ultimate justice.
The final chapter has not yet been written in this sad case. We can only hope that given Malvo's age at the time of the crimes, that the jury can find some mitigating circumstance not to recommend the death penalty. For in a real sense, he was the11th victim.
