John Lee Malvo

TEACHERS who taught John Lee Malvo in the late 1990s when he attended York Castle High School and Spaldings High have difficulty reconciling the boy they knew with the 17 year-old arrested in connection with the Washington sniper killings.

"Nothing at all in his behaviour would have indicated that he would be the person he is now," said Donavan Johnson who, in 1998, was Malvo's Grade 9 teacher at York Castle in St Ann.

The home of Leslie Malvo, father of John Lee Malvo, at Oakland Road in Kingston. (Jamaica Observer photos)

"I had to deal with him in the first term of Grade 9, but after that he did not return to school," Johnson told the Observer yesterday. "We don't know where he went after leaving. We realised he was missing but didn't know where he had gone."

Apparently, Malvo had left for Antigua where he is believed to have fallen in with John Allen Muhammad, the American ex-soldier, with whom he was arrested early Thursday in Frederick, Maryland in connection with the sniper murder of 10 persons and the wounding of three others.

Once the American media reported that John Lee Malvo had been a student at Bellingham High School in Washington state, Johnson concluded that it was the same person as Lee Boyd Malvo who he had taught four years ago.

He recalled that Bellingham High, through an e-mail from Diana Long, its Students Services secretary, had in December 2001 requested Malvo's transcript.

"At first I ignored the e-mail, which later turned out, when I opened it, to be a request for a transcript from the high school," Johnson explained yesterday. "By the time I opened the e-mail school was out of session and it was the December holidays. I, in addition, thought it was a rather irregular route through which to request a transcript, since it is usually a school-to-school transaction."

Johnson's name, Long said in her e-mail sent on December 4, 2001, had been given to her by George Leiter, an American volunteer who had helped to procure computers for York Castle High.

Johnson yesterday remembered Malvo as a warm, willing, bright child.

"He was very energetic and was running and smiling all the time," Johnson told the Observer. "He was friendly and quick-witted. He had a permanent smile."

Joy Bailey, the bursar at the school, also recalled Malvo as a "disciplined and well-behaved boy". She said that he was enrolled at York Castle High in 1996 after sitting and passing the Common Entrance Examination from the Gibraltar Primary School. The Common Entrance Exam, since replaced by the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT), used to be done by children in the 11 to 12 age range, to determine who got places in the island's leading high schools.

"The Lee we knew was quiet, disciplined and had a winsome personality," she said. "If it is he who is involved in the sniper killings, after leaving here something must have gone dramatically wrong in his life. That's not the person we knew."

Most of his report cards, teachers at the school said, were decent -- with mainly A and B grades. He did well at English.

Bailey said that Malvo boarded in Brown's Town, a bustling market town in the hills of St Ann, because his mother was abroad.

Neither Johnson nor Bailey could give a reason why Malvo would have left York Castle after his first year in Grade 7 and transferred to Spaldings High School for the September to December term 1997, then return to York Castle until he left at the end of the first term of the school year in 1998.

Delcy Williams, principal of Spaldings High, in the south central parish of Manchester, doesn't remember Malvo.

"I myself can't recall him at the school," she told the Observer.

The Spaldings High records show that he was placed in Grade 8 for one term, after transferring from York Castle. While the school's records show that he had a guardian, the name of the person with whom he lived while in Spaldings is not mentioned.

Williams said that there was nothing in the records that showed that he returned to York Castle.

"There was no request for a transfer, he just left," she said.

Williams said that the Spaldings teacher who remembered him best, described Malvo as "helpful and co-operative and a bright student".

"He did his work very well and for the term he spent here his grades were good," she said. "The subject teachers' comments were also good."

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