He had been right on time the day before. Nine o’ clock sharp in the morning. And he was quite pleased with himself for being on time. It was not something that he had done well, lately.

That was last Thursday.

So the next morning they waited. He was expected again at 9:00 am.

“When 9:15 came and I did not see him I started wondering if he had changed him mind,” Deacon Percival Palmer told the congregation of the Fellowship Tabernacle Church on Half-Way-Tree Road Sunday night. “Then another deacon called me and asked if I had heard the news that they had shot and killed Hugh Crosskill. I broke down in tears and cried.”

The story is typical of a few, others have been told in recent days, about Hugh Crosskill Jr’s search to break the back of the drug addiction that had brought low the English-speaking Caribbean’s finest broadcast journalist.

He has been through several programmes of rehabilitation and many efforts by friends and colleagues for him to kick the habit.

The addiction had cost him his family life. A divorce. Living precariously on the streets.

No one really knows. But maybe, just maybe, that towards the end Crosskill was finally on a verge of a breakthrough. That a spiritual awakening was about to, or beginning to, release him from his addiction.

He was shot dead early on Friday morning by a security guard at a medical complex at Ripon Road in Kingston in circumstances that remain unclear.

No one knows for sure what he was doing there at 6:30 in the morning or why someone who is normally calm would tussle with an armed security guard. Especially if Crosskill had found God.

Indeed, he was scheduled to be baptised at the Fellowship Tabernacle during Sunday service two days later.

“He had been talking to our pastor, Al Miller, for the past two weeks,” Palmer explained to the Observer after the regular Sunday night service. “On Wednesday night pastor introduced him to us because he said he wanted to talk. He had expressed a desire to be baptised.”

That was how last Thursday morning’s meeting was set up with Crosskill “to make sure that he knew what he was doing”.

Palmer and another deacon, Lloyd Robinson, were assigned to do the counselling.

Said Palmer: “He showed up promptly at nine and felt good that he had set a time and stuck to it. We led him through the ABC’s of Christianity — the basic tenets and then we prayed with him.

“The presence of God was very powerful in the room. Normally I don’t cry but I found myself crying. It seemed like he was almost slain in the Spirit and we knew that he had had a breakthrough.”

Slain in the Spirit, in evangelical parlance, means someone has had a powerful encounter with the Holy Spirit (God’s presence).

According to Palmer, Crosskill related his several failed attempts at rehabilitation centres to break his drug habit. He spoke of two previous “acceptance” of Jesus Christ. But he had never baptised.

“He said to us that he knew he was powerless to help himself quit and that he needed the Lord Jesus to help him…,” explained Palmer. “Hugh said that baptism would be a memorial for him. It would be a significant turning point to show that he had left the past behind.”

When Crosskill left Palmer and Robinson that day his intention was to go to the beach at Harbour View. He wanted to think by the sea.

He didn’t have a place to live, but he would remain on the streets, he told his counsellors. He wanted to reach rock-bottom, he said, so he could rise above his addiction.

“He had a small bible that he carried with him and he wrote down some scriptures from Romans that we had given him to memorise,” Palmer told he congregation. “Then he left.”

Then he left.