Still 'imprisoned'...
November 20, 2005
THE PERSECUTION of 80-year-old Ivan 'Alfred' Barrows continues, even today, four years after he was released from prison.
People still shout wildly and voice offensive expletives and homosexual jibes when they pass the paw-paw-coloured house in Aenon Town, Clarendon.
"Most people reject him. Is only one side of the family even attempt to look after him, and we are persecuted for it. People pass in vans and shout 'B___man', and when we go to Spaldings, a number of people who know us them drop dem word, and say things like 'dem can gwaan, dem have b___man money fi spend'," Beverley White, Barrows' niece, said.
While the abuse hinges on envy at the $9 million award from the Government, there is a deeper malaise at work here.
"These people just want to be nasty. They think that this sort of illness cannot happen to someone in their family and they are wrong," Ms. White said.
ABUSED IN PRISON
Barrows, who calls himself Ferdi Nettleford, was charged in 1972 for malicious destruction of property for breaking the glass pannelling of a bank in Chapleton, Clarendon.
He was taken to court in May Pen but was deemed unfit to plead and remanded him in custody until he was well enough to plead.
But he was instead sent to the St. Catherine Adult Correctional Centre and was never brought back to court.
"They abused him in prison; they did bad things to him there," Ms. White said.
Barrows maintains that he was raped by a warder, and his anal cavity was slit with a knife so the waste his body produces constantly leaks out.
"He has to wear pampers every day of his life. He even got syphillis. He also has the occasional asthma attack. He attends a health clinic in Spaldings once every two months, and has an inhaler. He takes pills for the pain in his side, and sometimes he haemorrhages," she said.
Barrows is also visually impaired because while in prison, "someone threw disinfectant in his left eye".
HUMAN RIGHTS INTERVENTION
He was released from prison without trial in April 2001 after the Independent Jamaican Council for Human Rights (IJCHR) intervened in the matter. In April 2001, the May Pen Infirmary refused to accept him but eventually his family took him in, and he has been receiving excellent care since then.
In the loving fold of his family, he is the portrait of contentment. His beard has been touched by a white frost.
Dressed in his socks and slippers, a blue shirt, and grey pants, he leans forward and speaks in a garbled run of words, his hands clasped serenely in his lap, but rocking backward and forward, in perpetual motion.
"Each February, we have a birthday for Uncle Ferdie, and we dance, and entertain him," Rochelle, a precocious, talkative teenager and Barrows' grandniece, said.
MISSING FOR 29 YEARS...
Author: Claude Mills
Source: Jamaica Gleaner
