FALMOUTH, Trelawny – Family members of the late Errol Campbell, who as a 23- year-old rookie cop received chop wounds to his head that left him paralysed during a bloody confrontation between lawmen and members of the Rastafarian community in the infamous 1963 Coral Gardens incident, are insisting that they have no animosity towards Rastas.

According to the recently deceased ex-cop’s brother, Mark Campbell, there is also no resentment towards the Government who initially denied the incapacitated cop pension on the grounds that having only served three years, he did not serve enough time to be qualified.

“We are not angry. We have never been angry with the Rastafarians, or even with the delay that followed requests for a pension from the Government. We have not been bitter, we are not angry,” Mark, Errol’s younger brother, told the Jamaica Observer West this week.

“We know the power and the beauty of forgiveness and we have become even a little more understanding of the complaints of the plight of the Rastafarian community that they think that society has targeted them and treated them harshly,” he added.

Errol, who miraculously survived the vicious attack on him over six decades ago, passed away on Wednesday, November 23. He was 82.

A thanksgiving service for his life will be held at the Falmouth Seventh-day Adventist Church on Sunday, December 18.

“Now that he has finally passed we have to look carefully that he is dead, given that he was almost pronounced dead [during the attack],” Mark quipped.

But even as the family members say they hold no ill feeling towards Government or the religious sect, there is a lingering disappointment that the 1963 incident shattered the then young cop’s dream of elevating himself and family from poverty.

“He joined the Jamaica Constabulary Force at the age of 20. He was seeking to escape the poverty of rural Jamaica, joined the force and then experienced this horrible event where he was wounded and became physically handicapped for the rest of his life,” bemoaned an emotional Mark, his voice cracking.

It was reported in the press that the 1963 riot was sparked by an old incident in which a Rastafarian sympathiser, Rudolf Franklin, was shot and seriously injured by a property owner in a dispute over lands. That incident sparked a violent altercation at a gas station in Coral Gardens resulting in a series of clashes between lawmen and Rastafarians from April 11-13, 1963.

At the time, the 23-year-old Campbell was stationed at the Barnett Street Police Station. Ironically, although he was off duty, he took up his colleagues’ invitation to join other lawmen who responded to the disturbance.

During one of the clashes, lawmen instructed the Rastafarians to drop their weapons. They submitted to the cops’ demands but on discovering that the lawmen’s guns were not loaded, they allegedly retrieved their weapons from the ground and launched their attack.

Errol and two of his colleagues, a superintendent and a detective, sustained injuries and were taken to hospital.

Five people, among them two policemen and the owner of a gas station in Coral Gardens, a swanky community in Montego Bay, were killed during the subsequent clashes. The Coral Gardens incident is commemorated by the Rastafarian community annually.

In the incident in which Errol was injured, he was placed among the dead but an attentive doctor realised that he was alive.

“They thought he was dead when they saw the extent of his wound. A part of the right side of his brain was chopped out altogether. So people who saw him in that state of unconsciousness, and with that level of wound to his head just assumed that he was dead. So it was the doctor who had to pronounce all of them who said ‘no, no this one is not dead; there is a little life in him’,” the bereaved brother said.

“So they separated him from the dead and in those days, the early post-colonial period, they found a plane in Montego Bay that was going to Kingston and put him on the plane and took him to the University Hospital.”

Mark recounted that two days after, upon his mother’s arrival at the hospital, she was approached by the head surgeon with the news that “your son, who was said in Montego Bay that he is dead, he is alive”.

But the medics declared that it was a miracle that saved him and not their work.

” And he stayed in that state of unconsciousness for several days. I think it probably ran into weeks before he regained consciousness. And later on he was transferred to Mona Rehab,” Mark said.

“The chop was in the left part of the brain so it affected the right side of his body. The right side of his body was dead. He couldn’t use his right hand again. All these 60 years his right hand could do nothing. The right foot Dr [John] Golding taught him how to walk with a stick dragging the right foot along. So he was really standing, basically on one leg.”

Mark hailed both retired and serving members of the police force who visited his brother over the period, making special mention of the “indefatigable Sergeant Wayne Wallace at the Falmouth Police Station”.

There are several accounts of abuse meted out to Rastafarians, many of whom were hunted down, trimmed, imprisoned and brutalised during the 1963 incident, which is also called the Coral Gardens riots.