LEFT: Jermain Lindsay accused London bomber.
RIGHT: Lee Boyd Malvo and father figure John Muhammad.
Ross Sheil, Staff Reporter
Worldwide media coverage of the infamous Collin Ferguson, Richard Reid, Lee Boyd Malvo and now Jermain Lindsay criminal cases, has further tarnished the international image of Jamaicans, or those of Jamaican heritage.
Apart from the alleged criminal intention of those mentioned above, there is another significant factor that begs deeper analysis and greater understanding. That is the factor of the missing or misguided father figure in the lives of three of the four men.
Absent fathers were highlighted in the cases of Lee Boyd 'Washington Sniper' Malvo and Richard 'Shoe Bomber' Reid. Nigel Lindsay, the father of London bomber, Jermain, said in a an interview last week, that he regrets sending his son off to England at five months old, and that he was not as involved in his upbringing as he would have wanted.
The question is whether having their natural father present through their childhood would have kept them from negative influence and future crimes.
Would the intelligent but impressionable Mr. Malvo not have helped John Allen Muhammad shoot dead 10 people? Would Mr. Reid not have pledged himself to Osama bin Laden and attempted to blow up an airliner carrying 197 people? Would Mr. Lindsay, an acknowledged devoted husband, and father, not have become a (suspected) suicide bomber?
Lee Boyd Malvo, then aged 17
Mr. Malvo was found guilty of terrorism and murder and sentenced to life without parole for his part in 10 sniper killings during a three-week period in December 2002 in the Washington area. He and his American 'father figure' John Allen Muhammad, 42, had demanded US$10 million from the United States government to halt the killings.
Malvo was born in Kingston in 1985 but his
parents separated when he was a toddler. since then he had little contact with his father, Leslie Malvo. His mother, Una James, often travelled to work leaving her son in the care of relatives and friends for up to several months at a time. And when he was 14, his mother moved them to Antigua.
Living in Antigua, they met Mr. Muhammad, a former U.S. Army sergeant, the man who fulfilled what Ms. James said was her son's life-long search for a father figure.
"It's just that Lee fell under the influence of the wrong man at the wrong time," she said of Mr. Muhammad who she allowed to take her son to the U.S.
Richard Reid, then aged 29
Mr. Reid was sentenced to 110 years imprisonment in the United States for attempted murder and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction (an airliner). He had attempted to blow up an American Airlines flight traveling from Paris to Miami on December 22, 2001, carrying 197 people, but was overpowered by passengers and staff as he tried to light a fuse, with matches, to trigger explosives in his shoes.
Mr. Reid was only half Jamaican; his British mother and Jamaican father divorced when he was 11.
A career criminal, his father Robin Reid spent about 20 years in prison. "I've seen the inside of most of London's prisons," he admitted to Time magazine. "I was no great example to my son."
His son followed a similar path, imprisoned for the first time as a 17-year-old, and spending the next two years in and out of prison. And then in a chance meeting some years later, father gave son some advice, convert to Islam, which he did, eventually leading to fundamentalism.
Mr. Reid took responsibility as an absent father, telling Time magazine, "I blame myself for not being there when he was growing up. I was in prison when I should have been there."
"He was so lonely, his life was so empty," his aunt Madeline Reid told The Telegraph. "He found solace with his Muslim brothers. With him, it became much more than a religion, they became his family."
Jermain Lindsay, then aged 19
Mr. Lindsay was moved to the U.K. by his mother when he was five month's old, leaving behind his father Nigel Lindsay. He converted to Islam as a 15-year-old and later married a British woman, Samantha Lewthwaite who is now 22 years old. They had a 15-month-old child together and she is eight months pregnant with their second.
His mother Maryam, alongside her Grenadian husband, gave a tearful press conference to reporters this week in which she described her son as a loving father, husband and brother. "I respected him and admired him so very much," she said.
Asked for more background information about her son she replied: " he was just brought up well. I think I did a really good job with my son." She added that leaving him and his younger sisters alone in the U.K. when she moved away was okay because they were supervised.
For his part, Nigel Lindsay told RJR radio last week his son "would've been better off staying in Jamaica since birth."
