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Dog Paw did not come out of the womb like that
McCaulay: 'An unspeakable tragedy'
BY JANICE BUDD Associate Editor - Sunday [email protected]
Sunday, February 13, 2011
ENVIRONMENTALIST Diana McCaulay, who tried to rescue Christopher ‘Dog Paw’ Linton and his siblings from illiteracy and poverty, has described the accused gangster’s alleged descent into a life of crime as an “unspeakable tragedy” and declared that society needed to “stop pretending that such men are merely irredeemably evil and are simply to be exterminated”.
At the same time, McCaulay — who said she knew Linton (photographed here) from he was eight years old — made it absolutely clear that she was not condoning any wrongs he may have committed. However, she asked Jamaicans to examine the reasons for a young man like Linton resorting to the kind of life that placed him on the police most wanted list.
Christopher ‘Dog Paw’ Linton
MCCAULAY... admitted to being heartbroken at the way Linton had turned from a young man with such promise, to a man accused of horrific crimes
Christopher ‘Dog Paw’ Linton 1/2
Linton, who was captured by police on January 24, is awaiting trial on charges of shooting with intent and illegal gun possession. Information has emerged about his unusual connection with McCaulay, an author and CEO of the Jamaica Environment Trust, in a blog written by journalist and SALISES, UWI editor Annie Paul.
Paul’s interview with McCaulay — posted online in her blog Active Voice on January 29 — followed the release of McCaulay’s novel, Dog-Heart; a fictional account of attempts by an upper-class woman to assist an innercity family, especially its young male members.
Both McCaulay and Paul gave the Sunday Observer permission to reprint excerpts of their interview.
The environmentalist had concerns about breaching the privacy of Linton’s family if she continued to speak publicly on the issue but told the blogger he was among several street boys she had tried to ‘rescue’. She only recently made the connection between the young boy she knew and the 24-year-old ‘Dog Paw’, whose name was said to have sparked fear in the hearts of many.
“I have known Christopher Linton was one of Jamaica’s most wanted men since just after Dog-Heart came out in March 2010. I have never talked publicly about it, though, for various reasons — mostly respect for his privacy and that of his family, and not wanting to use a tragic story for opportunistic book publicity,” said McCaulay.
“I’ve decided to talk about it now because I have seen such horrible comments about Christopher on websites, Facebook, and heard them in conversation — things like, ‘the police shoulda kill him’, ‘him is worse than a dawg’ and the like. I’ve decided to speak because I knew this young man, Christopher Linton — Damien was his pet name — from he was about eight, until he was nearly 15 or so, and he was a sweet, very intelligent little boy with great potential, and he was failed in every way by our society.”
The parallels between Dog Paw and her novel’s protagonist, ‘Dexter’ are seemingly obvious, but McCaulay squashed that notion when the question was put to her by Paul.
“In a sense, Dog-Heart was inspired by my relationship with a family of boys and their mother in the 1990s; my attempts to help. But the events and people in Dog-Heart are entirely fictional. Nothing in Dog-Heart really happened, and the people are quite different from that family,” she insisted.
McCaulay said she was appalled by the crimes Linton is accused of, and insisted that if he is guilty and convicted, he should be incarcerated.
“I want to say that like most Jamaicans, I am deeply concerned about the levels of crime in our society. I am as afraid as the next person, especially as I get older, and I do not want to face a young man with a gun who is prepared to take my life without thought,” she said. “But also, I want to challenge us as a people to examine the reasons for the genesis of a young man like Christopher.”
In the blog, McCaulay explained that herself and her boyfriend at the time, took it upon themselves to help educate four boys from the August Town area, beginning in the early 1990s and ending roughly in 2002. The eldest of the four, and the one who most impressed McCaulay, was Linton’s elder brother Jeffrey Jones — who was allegedly beaten to death in a prison riot years after she met them.
“It was really his brother, Jeffrey, who impressed me, and it was he we set out to help. To this day, I couldn’t tell you why he touched me in the way he did, compared to the many other children I have encountered in similar circumstances. I met Christopher and his brothers subsequently, and we then realised that we could not single out one child in the family for help, but had to make sure they all got the same assistance,” she explained.
Christopher, the second oldest, couldn’t read or write, she said.
“When I met him when he was about eight, he was completely illiterate, and he was in school. But he could not recognise or spell simple three-letter words. After just under four years in a good prep school — St Hugh’s — he passed his GSAT for Jamaica College (JC). So yes, he graduated from St Hugh’s. As I said before, he was a very bright boy, I am sure he is an intelligent man,” said McCaulay.
However, Linton “floundered at Jamaica College”, the transition from prep school to the high school environment setting him back.
“He was in a very small remedial class at St Hugh’s and at JC he was suddenly in a class of 40-plus. Within a year or so, he was asked to leave as he had not met the minimum academic standard. The school also reported he wasn’t attending regularly, wasn’t doing his assignments. We got him into another secondary school, but within less than a year, his grades were so bad that the sponsors I had found were unwilling to continue to fund his education,” she explained.
She added that the funding of Linton’s and the other three boys’ education came not just from her and her partner’s pockets. When the environmental activist left her private sector job for an environmental non-governmental organisation, she had to find other sources of money. She eventually got Jamaicans overseas and local business people to help fund the boys’ schooling.
She said she lost track of Linton’s family when she went to study in Seattle in 2000. On her return, she learnt from one of the boys’ teachers that the eldest boy had been killed in a prison riot.
“When I came back, I learnt of Jeffrey’s death, contacted Jamaicans For Justice who had spoken to his mother, saw one of the teachers at St Hugh’s who had been very involved with all four boys, and she told me that Christopher was no longer living at home and was in a gang. It was then that I started to think about the whole experience, question my own opinions, my own prescriptions that education is the answer, and eventually those thoughts became Dog-Heart,” McCaulay told the Active Voice.
She could only speculate what effect his brother’s death might have had on Linton.
“So think about it, at just over 14 or maybe 15, Christopher was out of school, with no prospects, no programme to learn a trade or anything, and then his brother was killed, beaten to death while in police custody. I imagine the rage and pain he must have been in, his entire family must have been in, and I am sure this event had something to do with the path his life then took,” McCaulay said.
“I want to say, look, I knew this man when he was a child, this man who is easy to hate, easy to demonise, but he did not come out of the womb like that, that he was a child who never had enough, ever, not one day of his life,” added McCaulay.
She admitted to being heartbroken at the way Linton had turned from a young man with such promise, to a man accused of horrific crimes. She was also very perturbed at how he was lost to the streets.
“Yes, I’m very frustrated by the lack of real change in Jamaica, by the weakness and lack of integrity in our leadership, by the lack of thought we Jamaicans ourselves bring to these problems, by the level of national discourse, by the way as ‘Motty’ (Wilmott Perkins) has always said, we trivialise our politics. It’s all a big party to us. I don’t know what it will take to bring about real change. Where this particular issue is concerned, I have no expertise, I’m just a witness, a storyteller,” said McCaulay.
She said she had been planning to meet with Linton prior to his being placed on the country’s most-wanted list, but it never happened.
The cops say ‘Dog Paw’ is behind several murders and shootings in August Town including the triple murder of sixyear-old Jaheem McKay, his mother Dania Forbes and uncle Marnis Hylton in Bedward Gardens on the morning of Sunday, December 20, 2010. The bodies of the three were burnt beyond recognition in their house.
The police came under intense gunfire as they responded to the gruesome attack.
In an exclusive interview with the Observer prior to his capture, Linton insisted on his innocence.
All quotes for this article were taken from Annie Paul’s blog Active Voice at
Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/...#ixzz1DrXZiPg8
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