NEVER in his wildest dreams did sports administrator Mike Fennell believe that he would have been the victim of a life-threatening crime.

He had done so much of what he is still doing today — working with youngsters, particularly in sport — and moulding the lives of many.

Having headed the Jamaica Boxing Association and represented Jamaica at water polo, it came as a shocker to him when he was subjected to thuggery.

Twenty-one years ago, the president of the Jamaica Olympic Association got a rude awakening when a bullet came close to hitting his daughter during a robbery staged by two men estimated to be in their 20s, at his St Andrew West Rural home.

“It was a Friday evening. My wife and I went to the house and we went back out to some friends’ home for dinner,” Fennell recounts of the experience that has since forced him and his family to adopt a more vigilant approach to general security.

“I got back around 10:30 to 11:00, drove back into the yard, and as we drove in, we were on the driveway, two fellows just jumped up at the gate. One pushed a gun in my face and said ‘keep quiet, keep quiet, keep quiet’.

“Both of them were talking at the same time and one said to the other, ‘Shut up, you don’t see me talking?’ It was obvious that one was in charge.

“He said to me ‘Where you gun, where you gun?’, and I said I don’t carry a gun. He then said, ‘Come open the door and go in the house.’

“We opened the door and went upstairs and they put us down to lie on the bed and tie us up and kept asking for the gun, where is the gun. I kept saying I didn’t have a gun, so they started to ransack the place,” Fennell said.

While his safety and that of his wife’s were of concern, the most pressing thing on Fennell’s mind was whether or not his daughter, who also lived at the house, would turn up during the robbery.

Lo and behold, the moment he feared arrived. His daughter’s date had dropped her off, seen her to the door and had left the scene without noticing anything amiss.

“My daughter had gone out to a party and I hoped that she didn’t come home at the time. By this time, one of them went to her bedroom and searched. They didn’t have a plan, they were just ransacking. And then one of them opened my briefcase and then I heard him say, ‘Wait little, tell me something, you are Mike Fennell? I said yes. He said ‘Sorry sir, sorry sir, but we have to do this because we can’t survive.’

“At that point my daughter came in. She walked right into it. My wife and I were on the bed and they put my daughter to lie down beside the bed on the floor,” Fennell said.

It was at that point that things got really terrifying for the former Calabar High School head boy, who sat in the same class as former Prime Minister PJ Patterson during the 1950s.

“One guy was very nervous. He was flicking the barrel of the gun out regularly and it went off. The bullet hit the bedside table and it must have passed my daughter’s head by about an inch. Based on where he was standing up and where the mark of the bullet went into the bedside table, it could only be around an inch past her head.

“The other one remonstrated with him saying, ‘Wha wrong with you man, you mad? Keep youself quiet.’

“But he obviously didn’t know how to use a gun, because he was just fiddling with the barrel in and out.

“That one kept quiet, and then the other one said to me, ‘Weh the car key? Weh the car key?’

“So I had a Cortina car there and gave them the car, and next thing they were upstairs and downstairs moving stuff out, I don’t remember all that they took, but it included a television, before they drove the car out,” Fennell added.

The suspects, who police said were killed sometime after in another robbery attempt, passed friends of the Fennell family along the road to Red Hills, some tooting and waving to the robbers in the car, thinking that it was the Fennells.

Having waited for a while and not hearing movements in the house, the Fennells freed themselves from a badly executed period of bondage.

“We waited and waited and waited, and when we felt that they were gone, we got up. They didn’t tie us up that well so it wasn’t difficult to pull the strings. We called the police and they came to do the usual thing. The next day they found the car down by Hi-Lo Cross Roads, with not much damage, maybe a little to the interior,” stated Fennell.

The issue of having a security presence was the next step for Fennell, who before that had rejected any suggestion of having someone watch over him.

“I was at Air Jamaica (as president) at the time and it was a question of whether or not I should have security, because when I went to Air Jamaica, they insisted that I should have security, and I said that it was not necessary. I was later provided with security for a while, and then I disbanded that.

“But certainly, I was frightened for my wife and daughter when the gun went off. It was terrifying, and the big surprise was when one of the fellows called my name. It wasn’t a conversation in which I was going to ask him where he knew me from and so on.”

Was he fearful that by knowing his identity, the robber might have sought revenge for something that he might have done to him in the past?

“No, that would only be relevant to you,” Fennell, who is known for his sharp wit, laughed and pointed at this reporter.

“I found it absolutely interesting, because obviously the fellow who went into my briefcase could read, when he asked me if I was Mike Fennell and he said ‘sorry sir, sorry sir but we have to do this because we can’t survive’.”

Fennel said he didn’t feel that threatened, because obviously they were looking for something.

“They didn’t say ‘if you don’t do this a going shoot you’. When the gun went off, that scared me a bit, but when the other fellow said ‘What you doing? You mad? No bother with that’ to the other, then there seemed to be a responsible approach by one of them,” he said.

That experience has taught Fennell and his family a tough lesson, one that has forced them to shape up on matters of personal security.

“We never fail to be very careful when we are going home, and if any advice that we have attempted to follow is to be more observant of the things around you, and we adopt a certain practice when we go out. I don’t want to say what that is,” he related.

“Today, cellphones are all over the place. You can programme them for immediate transmission, etc. It is a wonderful communication equipment,” he added.

Still, the hold-up was something far from his mind, having worked in some of the toughest inner-city communities in the past and being exposed to irregular behaviour by some people.

“When you operate in sport, not so much in business, you go all over the place,” said Fennell. “I can recall when I was at Berger (Paints, as managing director) and we were doing a community project between Trench Town and Boys’ Town, and a politician at the time asked me to come and look at it and when I went, he was surprised that I went in there by myself, saying ‘No, no, no, I should escort you in there’. The fellows with him said ‘You got to be joking, this man knows more people in here than you’.”

He also reminisced about how he used to play Junior Cup at Boys’ Town and would regularly picked up people and drop them home.

“People know, because in my days with boxing, I used to pick up boxers when they were travelling, so people know that. People know who do things for other people. This city is not unreal as a lot of people would think. But you have some people who are either desperate or influenced by drugs, and that’s more and more today than anything, and they are not in control of themselves or their senses. There are others who have been brought up in an intense drug and gangster culture,” he said.

“When you are involved in sport, you relate to people in a more intense way, rather than when you have a job in a factory, because you are dealing with a wider variety of people from different backgrounds. That has shaped my own attitude and approach to others, which may force me to drop my guard sometimes.

“That experience teaches you to be more vigilant. When you are going home you look to see if anybody is following you, when you reach your yard you look around to see if there is anything peculiar and you just try to be far more observant.

“I also don’t use ABMs at all, principally because I don’t have any money to take out of them, but at the same time, the exposure in a country like this… a man see you pulling out money, don’t care who it is, you are just inviting him to say ‘boy, how can I get some of that’.

“I think those people know a lot of people who either carry a lot of cash on them or keep it at home, neither of which I do, so they getting nothing. But the security of the person is more important than a television, or whatever it is,” Fennell said.