The video was so grim and distressing that, for a few moments, Neville Lawrence could barely believe what he was seeing.
Inexpertly filmed, it panned around a gaping chasm surrounded by rubble — the place, a faceless commentator intoned in a gravelly and dispassionate Jamaican voice, where his murdered son Stephen had been laid to rest.
As Mr Lawrence told me in an exclusive interview, his first assumption was that Stephen’s grave had been burgled by the racist gang who stabbed him to death in South London 31 years ago, or one of their associates.
He presumed the video, which was already circulating among ghouls on Instagram, TikTok and other sites and had been sent to him by a cousin, must have been posted on behalf of the thugs (at least three of whom remain at liberty) as a sadistic act designed to compound his grief.
Since he and his ex-wife, Baroness Lawrence, had chosen to bury the 18-year-old student in Jamaica because they feared the grave might be desecrated by the killers or their sympathisers had they interred him in a London cemetery, this suspicion was understandable.
Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death by a racist gang in south London 31 years ago
The more so because it looked to Mr Lawrence that his son’s white stone tomb had been ‘smashed open with a sledgehammer’ and left agape by someone who clearly had not an iota of respect for the young man’s memory, nor for the anguish this would cause his family.
Last Saturday, however, Mr Lawrence, 82, tells me his daughter Georgina phoned him at home in Mandeville, Jamaica, saying her mother wished to talk to him for the first time in years.
When the Baroness called him, he says, his distress turned to fury and utter disbelief.
For, he claims, it was only then — with the grave already excavated and Stephen’s body removed — that she informed him that she and other family members had decided to have Stephen’s body exhumed so he could be reburied in England.
‘Doreen just told me, ‘I’ve decided to take Stephen’s body back to England because we are getting old and one day nobody will be in Jamaica to look after him,’ Mr Lawrence said on the phone from Jamaica yesterday.
‘I couldn’t believe what she was saying. They are putting it out there that this was a family decision, but I wasn’t even consulted. Until my cousin rang me from London, I had no idea Stephen had gone. I was so angry that I just said to her, ‘Do what the hell you want!’ and put the phone down.’
Yesterday, Baroness Lawrence’s lawyer, Imran Khan KC, said his client disputed this version of events. ‘This is not an accurate representation of what occurred. No further comment will be made by Baroness Lawrence about personal and private matters.’
Mr Khan declined to say which aspects of Mr Lawrence’s account were disputed.
However, having known Stephen’s father for more than 20 years, and become his friend, I know him to be a stickler for the truth.
And if his story is true, many might think that — after losing his much-loved son in such an unspeakable manner, then suffering through three decades of police corruption and incompetence — it comes as the final injustice.
Grieving Neville Lawrence at son Stephen’s grave in Jamaica in 2013
Following Stephen’s murder, Baroness Lawrence remained in London, carrying the fight to bring the murderers to account
The genesis of this saga takes us back to that night in April, 1993, when Stephen, a bright young man with ambitions of becoming an architect, was waiting for a bus in Eltham, South-East London, with his friend Duwayne Brooks.
His fate, by now well-known, was to meet with five despicably racist teenagers who, in the words of a prosecutor, ‘swallowed him up’ before one of them, whose identity has never been established, thrust a long knife down through his shoulder. Only after Stephen’s parents spearheaded one of the most dogged justice campaigns of modern times were two of the murderers, David Norris and Gary Dobson, convicted and sentenced to life.
A t the time Stephen was murdered, Britain was mired in recession and Mr Lawrence was an out-of-work decorator, while his wife had just returned to education. As he later told me, they then had a ‘normal, loving relationship’.
Yet one of the many ramifications of the killing was that — for reasons he has never understood — it alienated them from one another.
‘From that moment we didn’t cuddle or hold hands for comfort, as you might expect a couple to do. We would sleep in the same bed, but we would lay side by side like statues.’
Six years after the murder, they went their separate ways.
Baroness Lawrence remained in London, carrying the fight to bring the murderers to account, starting a foundation that gives opportunities to disadvantaged young people, and lobbying for reforms in the police and justice system: work that has become her life’s mission and saw her deservedly elevated to the House of Lords.
Stephen’s parents chose to bury the 18-year-old student in Jamaica because they feared the grave might be desecrated by the killers or their sympathisers had they interred him in a London cemetery
Mr Lawrence took a very different path. Unable ‘to walk the streets where my son was slaughtered’, as he once put it to me, and candidly afraid that Stephen’s murderers might take vengeance on him for his determination to hunt them down, he opted for a new beginning in the land of his birth.
Though he spends much of his time at the modest house he had built in Mandeville, in many ways he shares his former wife’s commitments, returning to Britain for several months of the year to give talks on racism in schools and otherwise fight for change (work that has brought him a doctorate from Portsmouth University).
With Stephen’s case already the subject of much attention and the killers still at large, they agreed to bury him in Jamaica rather in the public glare of London.
When vandals attacked a plaque in Stephen’s memory, embedded into the Eltham pavement where he stumbled and died, the wisdom of this decision became clear.
Stephen was buried on July 4, 1993. The chosen plot was a remote piece of land, secluded by dense vegetation and reachable only via a crumbling road known to a few outsiders in Wood Hall, a small village in the southern Jamaican parish of Clarendon. It is owned by relatives of Baroness Lawrence, who played there as a child.
After a service attended by so many people it caused traffic jams, Stephen was buried in a fenced-off area alongside his great-grandmother and another woman who lived locally.
His grave is — or was until a few days ago — marked by a simple white slab upon which was mounted a photo of him and a black plinth in the shape of an open book. One of the pages is imprinted with comforting words. The other carries a simple message from his parents, brother Stuart and sister Georgina — ‘in loving memory of our son Stephen Lawrence, peace be with you always’ — and the dates of his birth, September 13, 1974, and his death, April 22, 1993.
‘Here, nobody knows where he is,’ Baroness Lawrence told the BBC’s Panorama programme in 2013, endorsing her former husband’s recollection — that this almost unreachable place had been chosen to thwart would-be desecraters.
‘Then again, I don’t think anybody deserves to have his body there [in Britain] anyway because they took his life,’ she added at the time.
‘I think that is still the best thing we did, that we brought him here so he can be next to his great-grandmother, so she can look after him.
‘I’m really pleased to have buried him here because had he been buried in the UK his grave would have been desecrated so many times.’
Down the years, when visiting the island, Stephen’s London family have, of course, paid their respects at the grave.
What makes this latest saga more poignant, though, is that for three decades his father took great pride in maintaining it.
No easy task given that it is frequently saturated by tropical storms and stands beneath luxuriant trees that drop their leaves on the stonework.
Neville and Baroness Lawrence during a news conference in 1999
For many years, Mr Lawrence would make the winding, 90-minute drive to the plot regularly, touching up the white paintwork and generally keeping things spruce, though the trek is a little more difficult these days and he confesses that he hadn’t been since last year.
Indeed, in recent weeks he hasn’t been anywhere much, for Jamaica has been hit by a devastating hurricane that knocked out his Wi-Fi, phone and electricity and has made it difficult to get about.
Things were just getting back to normal, last weekend, when his cousin called him from London to warn him of the sickening video fast ‘going viral’, he says, on the internet. It remains unclear who took the film, but among the places where it was still viewable yesterday was a Jamaican site with 411,000 followers showcasing local trivia such as islanders rehearsing their dance moves. A garish juxtaposition.
‘He was stabbed… and came here a couple of years ago,’ comments the vile man who is apparently filming the void where Stephen’s coffin had been. ‘Last night they came and they got back the grave (sic).’ It is difficult to make out the rest of his garbled, minute-long commentary because of his strong Jamaican accent. However, he seems to go on: ‘We don’t know the cause. We don’t know why….
‘They must come and seal it up… yes, Stephen Lawrence was stabbed and killed in England a couple of years ago. They came here and got the grave. We don’t know why….’
After a few more incoherent words overlain by staccato musical chords, the voice fades away.
Baroness Lawrence’s intervention came two days ago. Speaking out because these distressing images had appeared on social media, she said Stephen had been laid to rest in Jamaica ‘as we felt he would be at peace there’. But ‘after 31 years we have decided that we would like to bring Stephen home to be closer to us.
‘The images that are circulating were taken after the funeral home exhumed Stephen’s body.
‘However, we wish to express our distress at the funeral home’s lack of regard for our feelings and privacy, as evidenced by the decision to leave Stephen’s grave open to the public rather than closed off.’
Baroness Lawrence added that the family were ‘disheartened by the individual who chose to take the images and post them on social media. We had hoped to have carried out this sensitive task privately.’
She ended her statement by apologising for any distress the images had caused and asked that they be removed from social media platforms.
Yet Mr Lawrence is left to wonder why — by his account — nobody involved in the exhumation considered the distress he would suffer after learning of a decision in which he was given no say and played no part.
‘I still can’t believe this has happened, that they have taken Stephen’s body back to England, when I had no idea what was happening,’ he told me.
Neville added: ‘I had heard that Doreen had come to Jamaica with some family members, but I thought it was just for a holiday.
‘Why would she do this? Even if I had known it would have been hard to stop her, because she owns the land, but I would have moved heaven and earth to try. Stephen had been here for 31 years and he belongs here.
‘This whole thing leaves me with a lot of questions. Did they put his casket on the plane and was he cremated here first?
‘I suppose they must have got the permission of the British High Commission before they were allowed to take him.
‘But I have no idea where she intends to rebury Stephen. For all these years, we were worried that his grave would be desecrated by his murderers. Now it has been desecrated by his own mother’s decision to remove his body.’
Last night, Mr Lawrence’s sentiments were formalised in a statement issued by his solicitor, Guy Mitchell. He said ‘the decision [to exhume Stephen] and the damage done to the grave has not only distressed his family but supporters of the campaign for justice around the world.’
Professing himself ‘saddened’ by the affair, Mr Lawrence added: ‘Stephen was at peace in Jamaica and he has now been disturbed and taken away from what I believed would be his final resting place. I am appalled that my son’s grave has been vandalised in this way and left in such a terrible mess. I would not take my son back to the place where he was murdered.
‘I am confident, regardless of the decisions made without my knowledge and consent, that Stephen’s legacy will be sustained. I also reaffirm my commitment to keep fighting until I secure justice for my son.’
No one who knows this fine man — who is yet again immersed in sorrow and anger — would ever doubt that.
