BETHEL TOWN, Westmoreland — Nicholas Harding had served for only three years in the Island Special Constabulary Force (ISCF) when he was shot, in 1979, by two gunmen. Their bullets left him paralysed from the waist down.

While the injury itself was devastating, the thought that he had a six-month old daughter to care for was even more worrying to Harding.

Twenty-three years later, the 48-year-old Westmoreland man is finally receiving regular monetary assistance from the ISCF.

The first $4,000 cheque was delivered to him last week, along with an additional $2,500 from the association’s inspectors and sergeants and a basket of fruit and juices.

Harding is being assisted through the ISCF’s welfare fund, which will also provide financial support for Maxwell Clarke of St Catherine. Clarke was also paralysed in the line of duty.

Harding’s memory of the attack at about 1:00 am on April 21, 1979 is vivid.

He was assigned to the Harman Barracks and was given a ride home in a service vehicle. His two attackers pounced as soon as he was alone, and searched him, apparently for his gun. But Harding was unarmed. So the two men — one armed with a knife, the other with a gun — decided to kill him.

“You a go dead enuh,” threatened the gunman, who was known to Harding.

They then led him across the road to an unfinished house where he was shot in the left side of his head and right breast.

“When he fired the second shot I felt myself thrown backwards in the air and I fell on my back. I then saw the men jump a wall and escape,” Harding recalled. “While I was lying there, I was thinking to myself that I didn’t know that I would die this way. I also said a silent prayer.”

He lay there for five hours, unable to move his legs. At daybreak, he heard footsteps and saw a man passing.

“I tried to call out for help but no sound came out so I used a belt buckle to tap on the concrete and the man stopped and looked,” he recalled.

The man recognised Harding and rushed to get the wounded man’s father, who summoned the police.

Harding was hospitalised for a year, and given the heartrending news that he would never walk again as his spine had been damaged by the bullet that he took in the chest.

He spent some time at the Mona Rehabilitation Centre before asking to be sent home to his mother in Bethel Town.

“When he was working he used to help me,” said his mother, Cretena Moffeta. “But now I have to find money to help him. Sometimes I have to wash people’s clothes to get money to buy something for him.”

With some help from church members, she has cared for her crippled son over the years, but now she is suffering from ill health and caring for him has become increasingly difficult.

Now, with his regular $4,000 cheque from the ISCF’s welfare fund, some of the burden will be lifted from the elderly woman’s shoulders. There are also plans to extend the small room he now occupies at the rear of his mother’s house and add a small bathroom to it.

According to ISCF general-secretary, Inspector Leonie Smythe, the association is responsible for the welfare of its members.

The welfare fund consists of a pool of members’ donations of $30 monthly.

Harding’s attackers are now behind bars, serving life sentences for other crimes they committed. According to the ex-lawman, he learnt that the police had held the man who shot him in another incident in which he was carrying a gun. This led to the arrest of his accomplice.