ON a bleak Monday morning in the sleepy rural St James district of Mount Carey, hell spat up a terrible curse against a man who had spent his life in service of God and church.

Rev Dr George Simpson saw his life rush before his eyes, as two hapless gunmen mercilessly pumped three bullets into his face, chest and abdomen and then stabbed him four times in the hands, leg and abdomen, before going after his wife.

Fifteen months after that dreadful ordeal, the Baptist minister, in an interview with the Sunday Observer, describes in graphic detail the horrible events of May 26, 2008 that have completely upturned his life and left him in “the most excruciating pain I have ever experienced”.

Recalling how the gunmen left him helpless on the floor, watching his own blood oozing from his body, but refusing to die, the 65-year-old Simpson confessed: “I am distraught that this could have happened to me in Mt Carey, a community I had lived in for 28 years.”

“I was a friend to the community,” he agonised, his voice laced with disbelief and fleeting anger.

The tragedy to come might have been ominously foretold the previous Sunday night when gunmen tried to break into the Mt Carey Baptist Manse where he and his family had lived for almost three decades. He heard them trying to break off the mesh from a window. He turned on the verandah light, released his big Alsatian dog and called the police. The men fled the scene but not before poisoning the dog, Simpson said.

Over the previous six months to a year, five of his dogs had been similarly poisoned.

“It is believed that the same gunmen who tried to break into the house and poisoned the dog were the same ones who came back,” he suggested.

Why me, Lord?

The bloody attack that followed were the last thing that Rev Simpson could have imagined happening to a man of God.

The pastor was ordained a minister by the Jamaica Baptist Union (JBU) in 1969. In the ensuing years he was busy building the church. After 11 years in Stewart Town, Trelawny, he was called to the century-old Mt Carey Baptist Church in 1980. The circuit had two churches – Mt Carey and Shortwood – along with nine “class houses”, which are outstations of a main church. Simpson decided with his congregations to build the houses up into full-fledged churches. It was a mammoth task but he was on a roll.

Four of the class houses – at Roehampton, Bickersteth; Comfort Hall and Belmont – became churches. A new work was started at Shettlewood on the St James-Hanover border. Simpson was on fire. He was doing eight communion services a month.

“Of course, I could not have done all that without the tremendous support of the church staff and members. We had a shared ministry in which the deacons and lay leaders, in particular, did a great deal,” he wanted the interviewer to stress.

During that time, he also served the adjoining communities as Justice of the Peace (the young man who acted as lookout was believed to have received a recommendation from the pastor just three weeks before the attack); chairman of the Anchovy High School board and chairman of the Anchovy orphanage, among other areas.

Simpson, to keep fit, took early-morning walks. That fateful May morning, he did not. His wife had an appointment and he planned to accompany her.

It was 7:00 am when he unlocked the living room door and stepped onto the verandah, to face a masked gunman who was in a crouching position.

Keeping his composure, Simpson asked: “Why are you doing this to me?” The response was a shot to the pastor’s right temple.

As the blood spurted from his face, the minister instinctively grabbed at the gunman and yanked off his mask. The gunman called out to others, whom the pastor had not known were also on the verandah, and asked “Wha’ happn, oonu nah come ‘elp mi shot di bwoy?”

“The blood of Jesus! The blood of Jesus!”

Simpson, dazed but conscious enough to follow the events, turned around to see two other young men. One of them opened fire, hitting him in the chest and abdomen. He fell to the floor, shouting: “The blood of Jesus! The blood of Jesus!” Rattled, the gunman whom he believed was the first to shoot him, pulled a knife and inflicted wounds to both of the pastor’s hands, one leg, and his abdomen.

Rev Simpson said that the fact that he did not die right then and there on the verandah and is still alive today, was the first miracle that morning. There was a second.

Leaving him to die, the gunmen rushed after his wife, who had been on her way out when she heard the commotion. She ran back into the house and locked the passage door, in frightful panic that her husband might be lying dead on the verandah.

The gunmen shot up the door and then used a piece of wood to hit it. Still it would not budge. They then ransacked the house, taking a number of items, and left. From her refuge she called the police.

Simpson was rushed by the police to the Cornwall Regional Hospital several miles away, in Montego Bay, recalling one of the young cops saying to him: “Hold on, Minister, hold on!” He was taken immediately into the Intensive Care Unit where, he said, staff there saved his life.

Now he would begin the painful journey to recovery and again find himself at death’s door.

Simpson spent two weeks in the Cornwall Regional Hospital, where “I got excellent care”, and two weeks elsewhere. He then relocated to the United States from where he did the interview by phone, declining to say where in the States, for security reasons.

He has since undergone two major surgeries. The first shot had paralysed the right side of his face. To connect the nerve endings severed by the bullet, surgeons took the sural nerve from his right leg and connected the left side of his face through his mouth and the back of his neck to the right side of the face.

“I was very traumatised in the process. Shortly after surgery I developed pulmonary embolism, or blood clots, in the lungs. I came perilously close to dying,” he recalled. That process continues to clean up fragments from the ear that had resulted from the bulleting shattering the bone.

The bullet in the chest had made its way to the humerus, or upper arm, fracturing it down to the elbow. The second surgery involved the use of an electronic pulse machine to aid bone growth. But X-rays showed the bone was growing in the wrong direction. That had to be cut away and a titanium rod was implanted from the shoulder to the elbow. That, Simpson said, was progressing satisfactorily.

“But I suffered during that whole episode. I have never known pain like this in my entire life,” he said.

The treatment and medication came with side effects. He now has heightened diabetes and hypertension. Still he is thankful. He can walk, though not yet back to normal, and he can speak, though with a slur. He needs a special procedure to keep his right eyelid properly closed, because of the paralysis, but he can see.

Simpson said he must see the doctor two and sometimes three times per week but his recovery is on the way. He regularly visits six clinics: audiographic, orthopaedic; dental; ophthalmology; ENT (Ear Nose and Throat) and plastic surgery.

“It’s a great financial burden,” he said, but declined to dwell on it, choosing to thank God for sparing him and his church flock, friends and relatives for supporting him throughout. (See letter in yesterday’s Observer).

Two of the alleged gunmen, all of whom were between 17 and 22 years old, were held and are on bail, he said. The case has been called up five times – the last time in July this year – but has had to be put off because of insufficient information to place before the judge.

The flights from the States have added to the financial burden. Reflecting philosophically on the attempt on his life, Simpson said God was preparing him for something else on his journey and he did not question it. His faith remains unshaken and he was confident in II Chronicles 19: 7 – “There is no perversion of justice with the Lord our God, or partiality, or taking of bribes,” and in Colossians 3: 25 – “For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.”

To this day Rev Simpson does not know what sparked the attack. But he still believes in his God and in his country.