When Jacob Jules’ mother heard what he said on television last year, she made a prediction.

“He’s signed his death warrant,” she told family members.

Jules, 32, had been in and out of jail several times, dating back to before the building of Bordelais. The last time he was in prison, he spent 18 months on remand at Bordelais on suspicion of one count of murder and one count of attempted murder. When he came out, he stayed away from the usual troublespots around the city of Castries for a while. But then, as they say in the mafia, “You try to get out but they pull you back in.” The end result of that was Jacob’s death two Fridays ago—but not before Jules made good on last year’s threat to retaliate with violence and vengeance against police.

It won’t be hard for law enforcement in St Lucia to paint Jacob Owen Jules as a cop killer. He threatened police. And then, some months later, he carried out his threat.

But as Lucifer said to the angel Amendaniel, “There is another side to the sky.” If only to play Devil’s Advocate, the STAR looked into the life of Jacob Owen Jules to find out what sets a boy out on the path to violence, rebellion and a premature death. The answers are not surprising, but somewhat revealing.

The way things are being reported right now, it might seem that Jules was nothing but a bad boy with criminal intent and a loose tongue. But according to friends and family, the opposite was often true about him. Friends and family were unwilling to be named and photographed, afraid of the recrimination that might follow them for defending a man who made himself into St Lucia’s most visible public enemy number one. Jacob’s mother, still nursing her mixed emotions about the life her son led and the way the police took it from him, would not speak, not on record, not off record, not until her son is buried next Tuesday.

But deeply suspicious of the kind of justice Jacob Jules got for the trouble he caused, his sisters, cousins and friends talked. They agreed that Jules was not the belligerent, violent man that most people got to know through an edited news clip on Helen Television System’s most controversial evening news broadcast of last year.

“He was a humble youth,” said Sean, a friend from the Graveyard. “A real quiet fella. He was just frustrated and he let it get to him.”

Jacob Jules had an anger boiling up inside of him that was looking for some way to vent.

Rewind to the beginning of the story: Jacob Jules grew up in Georgeville, one of the densely populated, poor neighbourhoods on the edge of Castries. He did not finish secondary school. Typical gangsta, right? Wrong. He worked for years on the maintenance and repair of yachts. He never got certified, but he had at least one client who was impressed enough with his work that he had a job just about all year round. He played football for one of St Lucia’s most illustrious clubs—Spartans. His sisters remember that his great ambition in life was to build a house for his mother so she could live like the queen he thought she was. His family remembers him as loving and patient, although one sister can remember him taking the strap to her behind a few times, in the exercise of discipline.

But by the late 1990s, Jules had already served time in what was then Her Majesty’s Prison.

“Frustration got the better of him,” one sister said. “He was angry at the world.”
No one can say for sure what triggered Jules’ wayward lifestyle. But one crucial turning point was when he left prison near the turn of the millennium. According to friends and family, he became a target of constant harassment by the police.
“Everytime somebody from Morne du Don do something, they come and harass him,” family members told the STAR. Friends confirmed, “He cut his locks after that just so that the harassment would stop.” It didn’t.

Jules was at Bordelais on remand when his most reliable client left the island for good. He never held a steady job after that. In December 2008, he was released after the witness who identified him in the line up at the police station refused to identify him or testify against him in court. The case was dismissed, but for Jules, it was the beginning of the end.

“When he came back from Bordelais,” said another of his five sisters, “he said he wouldn’t go back to the Graveyard. But he went back. It was because of . . . he got friendly. . . that’s a whole nudder show.”

The STAR has learnt that this key witness later became intimately involved with Jacob and was one of the factors leading to his return to the Graveyard. Coincidentally, the same woman has been linked to the officer who was shot by Jules on the fateful night when he was killed.

“After he came out,” one family member who knew him intimately said, “he stayed by himself. He couldn’t trust anybody. He felt like he didn’t know who his friends were.”

The situation was made worse by constant, unwanted visitations by zealous police officers.

“It’s nonsense the police are doing,” an elder sister said. “Everytime they are going into people’s yard, harassing them.” The year 2009 was a breaking point for Jules. One day late last year, he saw an HTS news crew passing by and hailed them over telling them he had a story for them. It became the most talked about news story of the year, eclipsing the Ramsahoye Commission of Inquiry, the Labour party’s protest march and a host of other issues featuring people much more famous than he. In a moment, he became St Lucia’s most infamous bad boy—and all without firing a shot. All he did was open his mouth and say, on record, what hundreds of other boys in ghettoes across the island are thinking and saying all the time.

“They’re not playing the whole clip,” the elder sister said of one of the injustices done to her brother. According to her, the context of what he was saying is lost in the editing and paints an unfair portrait. Jacob, his family members say, was commenting on the connections between crime, unemployment and police harassment.

“In the rest of the clip,” the elder sister pointed out, “he’s saying that people have no work and they (the police) are raiding and harassing them causing more frustration. If we’re going to play what he said, we should play the whole thing.

“I’m not saying he’s innocent,” she added. “But he wasn’t a person looking for trouble unless he was provoked. He cared about people. He kept us so far from his life that he used to get vexed if we were talking to the fellas in the yard.”

It wasn’t enough however. The pressure continued to mount as Jules now felt like a marked man.

“He wasn’t a person looking for trouble,” family and friends agreed, “but once provoked, all the anger would come out.”

On the night he was killed, his mother got a call from the ‘key witness’ who, by the way, was no longer intimately involved with Jules.

“Haven’t you heard the shocking news?” his mother was told. “Jacob is dead. Finally, the killer has been killed.” But the trauma from Jacob Jules’ death was not over. Not for his family.

He was killed on a Friday night, but none of his family members saw the body until the following Thursday. They say that officers actually prevented them from viewing the autopsy.

“We told them a family member must be present,” the elder sister said. “But the officers told us we don’t need to be there because they started already.” When they finally viewed the body, they could not help but notice that his clothes were torn, as though ripped from his body. There was no blood on his pants, in spite of a gushing head wound. And there was a bullet hole in his chest, even though police reports confirm that he was wearing a bulletproof vest. It only served to increase the suspicion among family members that justice had not been done. In fact, they feel justice went drastically askew on the night Jacob died.

Lucky for the police, one staff officer did what the police force as a whole has been trying to do for a decade now, with mixed success. He communicated.

“He told us that the officers were wrong and that we had a right to be there. He explained the delay in why we didn’t see the body sooner was because it was under investigation. He told us they couldn’t cut him without us being there.”

That one cop might be the only reason why Jacob Jules’ family doesn’t write off the entire police force as a gang of assassins today.

Jacob Jules’ family is not trying to paint their beloved as an acolyte. He wasn’t and they know it. What they question is whether some people get a different kind of justice than others. They question why some people are singled out and targeted as the main culprits in a scourge of violent crime while others are free to do as they please, with the tacit blessing of main law enforcers.

Crime is a multi-million dollar business in St Lucia. But Jacob Owen Jules was not rich. Like most boys who are infected by the life of crime and violence, the lion’s share of the profits of crime did not find their way into his pockets. But Jacob Jules is dead while the profiteers of crime are alive and well, practically free from harassment, even as the
home affairs ministry orders police to crack down on the ghettoes and stamp out troublemakers.

To the Jules family, it sounds, not like a solution to violent crime, but a sure recipe for sparking off new tensions between law enforcers and the people they are supposed to protect, while the real criminals and profiteers get off scot-free again.