THE LONDON INDEPENDENT 25 JANUARY 2000

In a small English town, two black men are found hanged. Could they be the
victims of racist killers?

By Ian Burrell, Home Affairs Correspondent


25 January 2000

Harold and Jason McGowan were young men who had everything to live for.

Both men lived in Telford in Shropshire; Harold, 32, was a builder and
father of three children and Jason, his 20-year-old nephew, worked on a
local newspaper. He had recently married and bought his first house. But
within six months of each other, both were found hanged and today the deaths
are being investigated after claims they were victims of racially motivated
murders.

Michael Mansfield, the leading human rights barrister who acted for the
family of Stephen Lawrence, has agreed to represent the men's family in
their fight for the truth, while West Mercia Police have acknowledged the
"unusual" nature of the deaths and confirmed that the dead men had been the
subject of racial harassment.

Friends believe the hangings were the work of a "lynch mob" and, as Jason
was buried last weekend at a small Pentecostal church, the talk among the
shocked and bewildered congregation was that this was the calculated work of
a gang of racist killers.

Harold was discovered dead in an empty house with the flex of an iron around
his neck on July 2 last year. Six months later, on New Year's Day, Jason,
who had been trying to investigate his uncle's death, was found hanging from
roadside railings outside a leisure centre in Telford. The deaths followed
what the family claims was a sustained campaign of harassment: Harold had,
on several occasions, told police he believed his life was in danger. An
inquest with a jury will open next month into his death.

Last night Harold's brother Clifton said the family was unhappy with the
police's initial response to the death. He said: "We are convinced that both
Harold and Jason were killed by racists. They had no reason to take their
own lives."

He added that neither of the men had left suicide notes. However, no
evidence has yet been uncovered directly to link a third party with either
death. Detective Chief Inspector Ken Crane, who is leading the investigation
into Jason's death, said he was keeping an "open mind". He said: "As far as
the death is concerned, it is suspicious in as much as it is a death that we
have not got an answer to. It is very unusual to find deaths in a similar
fashion in the same family in such a short space of time."

Harold McGowan became a target for racists while working part-time as a pub
doorman, where he was strict in refusing entry to people banned by the
management. His tormentors began following him around, shouting abuse and
pointing their fingers at him in the shape of a gun. He received telephone
calls at work saying: "You're as good as dead."

Clifton McGowan said: "It was like a Chinese torture. A drip, drip effect.
If Harold was walking in the street, they would go up to him and say things
like, 'You're dead, nigger'. The McGowans' solicitor, Errol Robinson, said
Harold made a series of complaints to the police that he was being
victimised, although he never made a formal statement.

Mr Robinson said: "We have a transcript of one of his calls to the police in
which he said, 'I am basically saying that I feel in fear of my life'." He
said Harold had been told that he was on a "death list" drawn up by
far-right extremists.

Harold was found dead in a house which he had been minding for a friend who
was on holiday in America.

In the weeks afterwards, his nephew Jason, who worked as part of the
production team at the Shrewsbury Chronicle, began making his own inquiries
around town about the circumstances in which his uncle had died and the
people who had been taunting him. On 2 December, Clifton McGowan received an
anonymous call on his mobile telephone. The caller said: "If you don't back
off, one of the McGowans will be sorted out."

Jason had been married for only four months when he went out to celebrate
New Year's Eve with his wife, Sinead, at the Elephant and Castle pub in
Telford. He seemed happy and boisterous, buying cigars for his friends in
preparation for the countdown to the new millennium and ordering cocktails.

Half an hour before midnight, he took Sinead outside for some fresh air. She
became cold and went back inside. When she came back for him at five to
midnight he was gone, and searches and calls to his mobile phone failed to
locate him. The next morning his body was found dangling from the railings
outside the nearby Ketley Leisure Centre.

Clifton said: "Jason was very articulate and always kept diaries. We feel
that if he had been planning anything like this he would have sat down and
written something. But this was like a public hanging. It was by the side of
the road. Close to where his mother went to work and where his younger
brother went to school."

The double tragedy has devastated a family that came to England from the
rural St Thomas district of Jamaica in 1962. Within a year, they had moved
from Wolverhampton and settled in Wellington - a small Shropshire market
town that was later to be absorbed into Telford New Town.

Both Harold and Jason were born and grew up in Wellington. Shropshire's
ethnic minority population - which largely consists of the 5,000 Asian,
Chinese and Afro-Caribbeans in Telford - is one of the smallest and most
isolated in the country.

The Telford deaths have sent shockwaves through Britain's black community.
"Lynch mob Hits Family," The Voice newspaper reported yesterday. And even if
the circumstances of the McGowan tragedies remain for ever a mystery, the
fact remains that some black people now believe that the lynch mobs of
segregationist America are at large in 21st-century Britain.

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