Jamaican-born U.S. teen sniper suspect was offered as collateral

Lee Boyd Malvo

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

ST. JOHN's, Antigua: Mr. Lee Boyd Malvo, the Jamaican-born Washington, D.C. sniper suspect, was offered as a collateral to Mr. John Allen Muhammad, who later carried out the alleged horrific rampage that left 13 people dead.

The Baltimore Sun is reporting that the teen was offered by his mother to Muhammad, out of her desperation to leave Antigua for the U.S. She apparently could not pay for the forged travel documents so she offered her son and promised the money would come later.

"She didn't pay him in full for the documents," the paper quoted Mr. John Fuller, an Antiguan lawyer who investigated Messrs. Muhammad and Malvo's dealings on the island for the attorney general there. "John Muhammad went to visit her in Florida and said he was holding onto the kid until he was paid."

Antiguan authorities reportedly claim Mr. Muhammad held onto the teenager for more than a year - transforming him from a polite youngster into an alleged murderer. 

"He was his Svengali," Mr. Fuller told the Sun, in commenting on Mr. Muhammad's role in the young Malvo's life. "This was a young boy who had been a model kid, good-looking, clean, assiduous in his schoolwork. His father is gone, his mother disappears and leaves him and he falls into the hands of someone who in his mind is a fantastic substitute for both mother and father.

Muhammad gives him control and gives him direction and gives him ideas. This was just a little boy out of Jamaica. The trouble is the boy swallowed the whole [thing], hook, line and sinker."

Mr. Malvo is about to stand trial for a fatal shooting in Northern Virginia on 10th November and Mr. Muhammad on 14th October.  

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