Antigua Alleges ‘Serial Forgery’ by Sniper Suspect

Nearly 18 months before the national shooting spree, sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad smuggled his teenage companion into America from this remote Caribbean island with forged documents identifying the boy as his firstborn son, according to Antiguan government documents and official accounts here Friday.

Newly uncovered immigration documents have convinced Antiguan authorities that Muhammad illegally brought the Jamaican-born Lee Boyd Malvo into America along with three of his children in May 2001. Antigua’s top investigator of Muhammad’s 14-month stay here now says that trip culminated more than a year of “serial document forgery” by Muhammad that compromised America’s borders and Antigua’s sovereignty.

Detailing the investigation’s preliminary findings, task force chief John Fuller said Friday that two additional Antiguan passports were issued to foreigners on the basis of documents Muhammad allegedly forged -- documents similar to those Muhammad used to get his own Antiguan passport. One of those foreigners and Muhammad also used similarly forged documents in failed efforts to get a U.S. passport here, Fuller said.

Antiguan investigators turned over Muhammad’s and Malvo’s immigration documents to the FBI on Wednesday. Those records, which The Times also obtained this week, along with new accounts from key witnesses here, provide the first solid evidence of the origin and character of the relationship between the man and the teenage boy U.S. investigators say terrorized suburban Washington for three weeks last month before they were arrested in suburban Maryland.

Officials speculate that Malvo, now 17, became dependent on the father figure who made his illegal passage to America possible, and that Muhammad sought out Malvo after losing his eldest, teenage son in a bitter custody battle.

Fuller said it was no coincidence that Muhammad used his own son’s name to smuggle in Malvo. Before their departure, Muhammad also is suspected of forging documents to smuggle Malvo’s mother, Una James, out of Antigua and into the U.S.

“She [James] obviously left with documents provided by John Allen Muhammad, probably to get her the hell out of here because he wanted to have the boy for himself,” Fuller said.

Antigua’s continuing investigation into the life and times of Muhammad and Malvo in this island nation reveals that Muhammad easily won the confidence of strangers, casting himself as a model single father, while allegedly living a shadowy life as a forger and migrant smuggler who often traveled alone between Antigua and the U.S.

Muhammad apparently befriended even the police who were guarding him at the St. John’s police station after he was detained at Antigua’s airport on suspicion of trying to smuggle another Jamaican out of the country. Muhammad simply walked out of the station on March 13, 2001, while the police corporal on duty wasn’t looking.

Fuller described the Muhammad who lived here as “a charismatic character who easily inveigles his way into a person’s good graces

“This man,” he added, “had a suitcase of different aliases,” beginning with the one he used when he landed on this island thousands of miles from home.

The strange saga began on March 27, 2000, when Muhammad, who was then legally named John Allen Williams, picked up his three children from his ex-wife’s home in Tacoma, Wash., promising to return them the next day, according to court documents in Tacoma.

On March 28, however, Muhammad and his two daughters and son landed not at their Tacoma home but at Antigua’s V.C. Bird International Airport.

Immigration documents show that Muhammad entered Antigua as Thomas Allen Lee on American Airlines Flight 5502 from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He produced a Wyoming driver’s license and a Pennsylvania birth certificate; both documents apparently were forgeries.

For his children -- Taliba, Salina and John A. Williams Jr. -- Muhammad produced forged birth certificates from Illinois, Michigan and Alabama identifying them as Theresa, Lisa and Fred Allen Lee. Muhammad signed all of their immigration arrival cards “Thomas Lee.”

Fourteen months later, in handwriting nearly identical to Lee’s, John A. Muhammad signed the departure cards for the children under their real names.

Accompanying the four on that flight was a Lindbergh Williams, whose name, birth date and birthplace were identical to those of Muhammad’s real son from an earlier marriage, according to the immigration documents.

“I’m absolutely certain that Lindbergh Williams is Malvo,” Antigua’s Atty. Gen. Gertel Thom, who is coordinating Fuller’s investigation, told The Times in an interview this week. “Lee Malvo clearly entered Antigua in 1999, and we have not been able to find any record of Lee Malvo ever leaving the country under his real name.”

Officials have determined that Lindbergh Williams was with his mother in Louisiana at the time. The boy has had only limited contact with his father since Muhammad lost a 1995 custody battle for Lindbergh, according to relatives in Louisiana and court documents in Tacoma.

Although Antiguan investigators are still trying to determine how Muhammad and Malvo met, they are certain it was here -- sometime during the 14 months they were foreigners in a small, inviting and accommodating foreign land.

Here is what is certain from witness accounts and the documents investigators have unearthed so far:

On his arrival form on March 28, 2000, Muhammad stated his profession was “car repair.” His nationality, he declared, was “Black American,” the same designation he listed for his children.

Janet Kellman, an Antiguan and the cousin of one of Muhammad’s friends in Tacoma, picked them up at the airport that day and housed them for five weeks. Two weeks after their arrival, Muhammad enrolled the children at Greensville Primary School -- a weathered, wooden schoolhouse with a rusted tin roof that caters to Jamaican immigrants in St. John’s. He paid about $170 in tuition for each.

During the fourth week of their stay, though, Kellman recalled in an interview, Muhammad told her he was returning to Washington “to get some money” and would be back soon.

“After he left, I was speaking to the children and some information that I got from them, I realized that something was wrong,” Kellman, who knew Muhammad and his children by their real names, said in a radio interview with an Antiguan station. When Muhammad called from Washington, Kellman told him “he better get a flight back right now.”

“There are things that he is hiding from me and I didn’t like it.... I accused him of stealing the kids,” she said.

Muhammad promptly returned, and Kellman promptly kicked them out.

The four then moved into a clapboard house the size of a trailer on concrete blocks beside the Greensville school. They sublet from a Jamaican couple, Charles and Dolly Douglas, and slept on the floor. They had no running water, and there were a dozen adults and children living there, the children’s teachers and roommates later recalled.

“They were lovely children: respectful, nice and very smart,” recalled one of their teachers, Muriel Allen Bennet. “And he was a wonderful father. He came into the school three times a day just to check up on them.”

Greensville’s founder and principal, Janet Harris, agreed. Harris was so taken in by Muhammad’s charm and fatherly way that she later lied to support his successful application for an Antiguan passport and in a letter recommending Muhammad to potential employers.

“I have known John Williams Sr. [Muhammad] for one year and seven months and have found him to be an honest and trustworthy young man who possesses certain attributes that make him very likable and easy to get along with,” Harris wrote in the letter, dated just two months after she met him.

Muhammad, she added, “tends to illuminate his environment with his pleasantness and extroversion. He adheres to high moral and religious principles that will certainly help him to cope with the various challenges in his personal and employment life.”

He applied for a job with the Antiguan government’s Sports Ministry, submitting photocopies of diplomas showing that he had a bachelor of science degree from Southern University and A&M; College in Baton Rouge, La., and a master’s degree in physical education and science from Louisiana State University. Accompanying them was a letter allegedly from LSU’s track and field coach stating that Muhammad was an “exceptional” assistant coach for a year there.

“P.S. If you don’t want to win, don’t hire this man,” it said.

Even at the time, ministry officials suspected they were forgeries, which investigators say they have since confirmed. They asked Muhammad to return with the originals. He never came back.

Antiguan investigators say they have found no record of legitimate employment for Muhammad here. Rather, they allege his occupation was providing forged U.S. birth certificates, driver’s licenses and other documents for Jamaicans and other migrants seeking to enter the U.S. illegally.

Kithlyn Nedd lived in the house beside Greensville school for much of the year Muhammad lived there. Nedd, whom Fuller praised Friday as a highly credible witness, said in an interview that he has provided investigators with the names of several Jamaicans he believes Muhammad smuggled into America. Among them: Una James, Malvo’s mother.

That contradicts the account Malvo and his mother gave to Immigration and Naturalization Service agents after they were detained as illegal migrants last Dec. 18 in Bellingham, Wash. They told the INS that they were smuggled into Miami on a freighter from Haiti in June 1999. But investigators said immigration and school records here document that Malvo and his mother lied to the INS about their arrival -- most likely, they say, to protect Muhammad’s role in it.

Those Antiguan records show that Malvo’s mother arrived here from the Jamaican capital of Kingston on Jan. 15, 1999, on a Jamaican passport issued to her a month before. She then sent for her 13-year-old son, who arrived in Antigua in July 1999.

In September 1999, James enrolled her son in the 10th grade at St. John’s Seventh-day Adventist School and paid the school fee of $230. The boy attended regularly until “he just disappeared” one day two weeks before Easter break in 2001, according to the school’s principal.

The principal, who asked not to be identified by name, described Malvo as “a very good student.” “He was an outspoken child. He wasn’t a bit reticent. He would express opinions without being rude.”

His mother’s movements in Antigua are still much of a mystery. To obtain her work permit, James stated she was a maid for Simon Peterson, an Antiguan sea captain who has since died. Several witnesses also said she worked as a street vendor.

But everyone who knew her or the boy agreed she had left the island well before he did.

“I knew his mother was no longer with him” by then, the principal added. “She had left him with somebody here in Antigua.”

Nedd said that “somebody” was Muhammad. He said Malvo and Muhammad met near the house beside the primary school, a 15-minute walk from Malvo’s school. He and other witnesses in the neighborhood said the two were seen together for about two months before all of them disappeared from the island.

“John [Muhammad] already fixed up some documents for his [Malvo’s] mother to leave Antigua, sometime in 2000, about like in October,” Nedd said. Friday, Fuller said his investigators are poring over the records for some 5,000 passports issued while Muhammad was in Antigua.

Atty. Gen. Thom said investigators have been examining thousands of departure documents to determine how James left Antigua for the U.S. Immigration records show no legal departure for her or her son.

But police and immigration logs already have convinced Fuller and his task force why they all left on May 31, 2001.

Muhammad was detained at Bird airport on March 11, 2001, after he checked in for a flight to San Juan under a false name, Dwight Russel. Police suspected he was attempting to smuggle a Jamaican named Howard Kelly out of Antigua, and they held Muhammad at the St. John’s police station for questioning.

Two days later, Muhammad simply walked out of the station. Fuller said Muhammad left the island soon after under another assumed name, and on April 23, Muhammad appeared in a Tacoma courtroom to change his name to Muhammad. Then, immigration records show, he returned to Antigua as John Allen Muhammad on May 25.

Six days later, he packed up his possessions at the crowded clapboard house, loaded them in a taxi and flew off to San Juan and points beyond with his three children and a boy who assumed the identity of his son.