The worst experience that Romardo Rickardo Lyons ever had served to convince him to become a journalist.

That the police/military operation in Tivoli Gardens, West Kingston, in May 2010, turned out to be the measuring stick is the unfortunate reality that Lyons, a Jamaica Observer employee and recipient of the Press Association of Jamaica’s Young Journalist of the Year for 2021, faces in his daily quest to provide information to the public.

Then a lad approaching 12 and laying a foundation for his future at Calabar High School, Lyons remembers clearly the rude awakening that not only unsettled a community and, by extension, a nation, but led him to develop a hatred for the security forces soon after, which he admittedly has now tempered.

The self-confessed “house rat”, and well-behaved youth while growing up at Tivoli Court, had a balanced family structure, headed by father Owen, a shop owner at nearby Coronation Market and pest control specialist; and mom Pamela Maynard, a then municipal police officer strict on discipline and education; along with an older brother.

Life for the man raised in a community that many label with more negatives than positives was quite a mixed bag. He breezed through St Aloysius Primary School with the caring eye and presence of a mother who followed him from Tivoli to Duke Street up to the fifth grade when he begged her for a reduced ‘security’ presence for him to roll with his friends to and from home.

But just as he prepared for another positive jump, despite missing out on his Grade Six Achievement Test first choice, which word has it was also his mother’s, Kingston College — something he said he did not “quite remember” — the young man, green with exuberance, encountered a passage along the journey that almost took his shoes off.

“I was in my first year at Calabar when it occurred. Every time I remember the incursion — the image is me just remembering myself, my mother, niece, and brother under the bed. My father was trapped in the market, as he was selling up until the time everything started. So he had to stay there,” Lyons explained.

“It is the worst experience I have ever gone through, because at that age I really thought that we were going to die. It was just gunshots and then we started hearing explosions, family members in different parts of the community calling and telling us to ensure that the doors are locked, because they are hearing that bad men going into houses and police running after them and things like that. I remember my mother and brother crawling on their chests out of the room going to push a whatnot to block the front door.

“For me, it was just tears, crying… weak. I remember my mother going to the kitchen, because we had food but it wasn’t a situation where you could just walk to the kitchen, she crawled and got food, but I couldn’t eat. She was there praying and saying ‘God help us out of this, if you spare us I will give my life to God,’ which she did,” Lyons said.

The operation saw police and soldiers moving into the West Kingston community, primarily in search of wanted man Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who was being sought to be extradited to the United States to answer allegations criminal in nature in that North American country.

Lyons had heard of the man who was said to have run Tivoli Gardens like his private fiefdom, but had never seen him. Coke is now serving a 23-year prison sentence at the low-security Federal Correctional Institution, Fort Dix in New Jersey, United States, after he pleaded guilty to federal racketeering and drug trafficking charges.

“There was one particular memory as well,” he continued. “I lived on one of the high-rise buildings and remember soldiers coming in and they were like, ‘If yuh have any gun inna yuh house throw dem out now, and mek sure we nuh come find nutten.’ That went on for five minutes until they started telling people to come outside. We had to go down the stairs to them. My mother made the decision that it would be best to follow and allow the soldiers to come in and see.

“She went out first, looked if other neighbours were coming out, and soon others were calling out to each other to say ‘Mek we come out.’ Gunshots were literally passing us. [Water] tanks on house tops… you heard when the gunshots hit the railing. The place was dark, it just had a weird smell, smoke…all of that. So we went down, they took phones and had all of us in one house — all males in one house, all females in another house. So I was separated from my mother. It was me and my brother and we had to be on the ground, all the men packed up in one space, you either leaned against a man’s back, a man’s foot crossed yours, and things like that,” Lyons recalled.

“Soldiers and police firing shots through windows, spent shells flying. We stayed there for around an hour until they discovered that my mother was a municipal police and they asked me where we lived — the last floor, still separated, with the females in one house and the males in the adjacent house.

“We stayed there overnight. My mother was the only person in her house, so she made breakfast and brought it over and we shared everything. If six plantains came, you ended up with a piece. How I reunited with my mother two days later was when the police decided that they were going to detain the men. I was in the group with the men and I heard my brother saying, ‘Him is just a little youth man, mek him gwaan.’ And my mother came out and said, ‘Please, officer mek him go’. I was tall, so looking at me they probably thought I was 18, 19. That’s how I came out. They said to me ‘All right, gwaan,’” Lyons related.

According to Lyons, his brother had been taken away with other men for “a good while”, and there was anxiety not knowing if he was dead or alive. When he returned to the family house, the brother’s personal tale of him being held in the rain, and shots being fired over his head, were told.

Although Lyons missed school for two weeks, he made up quickly for time lost, though initially he was not in the frame of mind to return to classes. Thanks to helpful teachers and fellow students, who kept in touch with him throughout the ordeal and long after, he regained his composure.

As to his decision to pursue a career in journalism, Lyons said, though he didn’t understand fully what journalism entailed, he knew that media was his thing while he pondered life after sixth form at Calabar.

“As time progressed, and more things happened in Tivoli, incidents with police, internal conflicts, I always wondered why certain things were not reported. Many people died in Tivoli that I knew, and a nine-night just keep, then a funeral, and that’s it. No reports of the deaths. I wanted to change that,” he said.

Encouraged by a cousin employed by Kingston & St Andrew Municipal Corporation, who acts as his advisor, her prompt that he could become a “media personality” went far in his decision to apply to the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication at The University of the West Indies, Mona campus, in 2016.

Money challenges during the three-year bachelor’s degree journalism programme led to some hitches along the way, which led him to even contemplate writing to Prime Minister Andrew Holness for financial assistance, but his mother’s decision to keep pushing served to complement what his father earned to fund the study mission.

Now settled in his craft and looking to do much more, the 24-year-old winner of the Raymond Sharpe/Hugh Crosskill Award for Sports Journalism too, announced a week ago, has forgiven the security forces, though memories of what transpired linger.

“Yes, I have forgiven them. I hold them in a different light, because being in media I also come across police officers on a daily basis and they have shown that you have really good police officers and good soldiers in the business, so that was one of the things that allowed me to understand that you can’t just group everybody,” he said.

“Even on the road, being a Calabar student, a few police officers on the road looked out for us as youngsters. That allowed me to realise that not all the apples in the basket are spoilt, but at the same time I am conflicted. Maybe it’s because I am out of the Tivoli space now. I have, nonetheless, decided to put that behind me. If I see police or soldiers now. I have no hatred or resentment for them,” the man his friends in Tivoli called Mardo revealed.

When news of his winning two awards during the PAJ ceremony emerged last week, his parents, in particular the more expressive mother, were ecstatic.

His mom would even remind him of other things that happened post-2010 — coming from late evening drama club, or modern language club at Calabar on the Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC) number 44 or 46 bus not knowing about a shoot-out, and she would get on the phone to him saying things like don’t walk there or there, or walk through the market.

A former employee of the Star newspaper, where he spent a year and four months, following a month-long internship at Radio Jamaica, Lyons has been a key member of the Jamaica Observer‘s Sunday Desk, which has produced three individual winners, over four of the last five years, in copping the Young Journalist of the Year prize.

He insisted that he will do all that he can to get more youth from inner-city communities to take up journalism.

“We need more journalists coming from inner-city communities, because many of the success stories are unheard — many youth in inner-city communities doing well, but there is no link to give them that highlight. So we need more people to help break the stereotype.

“It’s 2022 and Jamaica needs to get to a place at which inner city, or ghetto people as many put it, are viewed a particular way. Some of the best people come from the ghetto. We have limited opportunities, sometimes we lack the funding and the support, and it’s full time something like that changes, which is why my awards are so special, because I feel like they add to that. It’s helping to re-brand the ghetto.

“I just want to be one of the best to ever practise journalism. I really love it. There are habits that I have developed, bad one’s too because of my love for journalism. Some days the work is so interesting to me and I am enjoying what I am doing that I don’t remember to eat until late…and then gas pain the next day, headache, so I am just trying to strike a balance to be responsible and be conscious health-wise,” he said.