The killing of Brij Sharma in Co Derry was racist, argue his family, who want the case reopened. Susan McKay reports
Nobody heard a row. Nobody looked out of their window onto the street and saw Stephen McGlone throw the punch or punches that killed Brij Sharma, nor what happened in the minutes before that.
Or, if they did, they haven't said so. It was in the early hours of a Sunday morning in late April 2004, in the small town of Moneymore in Co Derry.
The first Rosemary Brady knew about it was when she came down the stairs from her bath to find her front door open. "There was a girl there and she told me to get a glass of water," she says. "I asked who it was for, and she said, 'your boyfriend'. I said, 'What happened to him?' She said, 'He must have fallen.' I went out and Brij was lying in a pool of blood beside his car." She knelt beside her lover and tried to lift him, but couldn't.
Stephen McGlone (20) and his brother, Mark (25) were there. She asked them to help and they carried the dying man back into her house and laid him on the floor. "Stephen said, 'Well, he got what he f***ing well deserved'," says Rosemary. "Mark said Stephen hit Brij because of what happened with the child. He said, 'You know who we are. There's to be no police involved'." The McGlones left then.
"What happened with the child" occurred a couple of weeks before this. A child related to one of the McGlone brothers was kicking a football against Brij's car and Rosemary's window. Brij went out and remonstrated with the boy.
"He called Brij a Portuguese bastard," says Rosemary. Sharma was dark-skinned, and from India, though he'd lived in Belfast for 28 of his 38 years and spoke with a soft Belfast accent. Rosemary went and told the boy's mother, a neighbour, what the child had been doing. "She said she'd friggin' kill him."
Stephen McGlone punched Brij so hard into his face that he fell, smashing his head against the pavement. After Mark McGlone told her not to call the police, Rosemary called her friend, a nurse. "She told me to call the ambulance and the police. I said I was afraid. She said, 'Phone the bloody police.' They asked me what happened and I was afraid. I said, 'He fell.' My friend said, 'Tell them the truth.' So I did."
Rosemary travelled in the ambulance to the hospital in Belfast, where Brij was taken to intensive care and put on a ventilator. Back in Moneymore, the McGlones returned to Rosemary's and began kicking Brij's car, causing considerable damage. By this time, word had gone around and some of the neighbours, young women, came out and remonstrated furiously with the brothers. Mark McGlone reportedly replied: "Sure he was only a Paki bastard." Stephen McGlone had a question: "Who gives a f***?"
LAST WEEK, THE Police Service of Northern Ireland held a major human rights conference in Belfast on hate crime. The Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities (NICEM) told the conference that new legislation on hate crime isn't working. It believes the police tend not to see hate motives and is also deeply critical of the role of the Public Prosecution Service. NICEM's chief executive, Patrick Yu says, "People from ethnic minorities become victims of the whole justice system."
Sharma never recovered consciousness and died three days after he was attacked. Stephen McGlone had been charged with causing grievous bodily harm with intent and Mark had been charged with intimidation and criminal damage.
On May 7th, Stephen was charged with murder and remanded in custody. Two weeks later, he was given bail after Lord Justice Nicholson said in court that there was no evidence of an attempt to murder. The case, postponed three times, was finally heard in December 2005. Sharma's family had been told the murder charge had been dropped, and were unhappy about this. They were shocked by what happened in Belfast's Crown Court. They heard Stephen McGlone plead guilty to manslaughter, and then they heard the judge, Mr Justice Morgan, give him a sentence of 17 months in prison. Mark McGlone got 100 hours of community service for attempted intimidation.
The Sharma family is united in its anger over the leniency of the sentence. "It is a disgrace and an insult to all of us," says the dead man's widow, Heather Sharma. "I wrote to both the [ British] Attorney General and the Public Prosecution Service to say so."
Brij Sharma had been living apart from his wife and their two children, Amit (13) and Kavita (17) for the three months before his death. Brij's brother, Bharat, speaks for his birth family. "When we got to court, the prosecuting barrister warned us we might be disappointed. It flies in the face of humanity to say that 17 months is a proper sentence. Is that all my brother's life is worth?"
However, the family is divided over what should happen next. Bharat Sharma believes his brother was murdered and that the crime was racially motivated. He is calling for the case to be re-opened, and for there to be a public inquiry into the way it has been handled. He has sought and got the support of NICEM. Heather Sharma does not agree. "This isn't about racism," she says. "It is about a stupid game of football. This is very painful for me and the kids. We need to move on."
The Sharma family, which is Hindu, had moved from Gujarat to the Punjab and then to Northern Ireland in 1976 when Brij was 10. The family lived at the nationalist end of the Limestone Road in North Belfast and Brij went to school at the loyalist end.
Brij was, his brothers say, the rebel in the family, the black sheep. He didn't practise Hinduism. He married Heather, who is Irish and from East Belfast, instead of accepting the family tradition of arranged marriages. He was a playful figure. When he worked as a waiter in Ciro's restaurant in the 1980s, he used to pretend to be Antonio from Italy.
His shop, Heather's Mini Market, was on the frontline for sectarian skirmishes, midway down the Limestone Road. He kept it open through paintbombs, blastbombs, firebombs and bricks. He couldn't get staff because it was too dangerous for them. Some summers, there would be riots outside almost every afternoon. "He used to have to barricade himself inside," says Bharat. "He used to say, 'they'll be in here for sausage rolls and cigarettes afterwards'."
He sold a lot of cigarettes and painkillers. He was generous. He ran slates for many of his customers. He talked to people about their troubles. He was losing money, but couldn't sell the shop because nobody would have bought it.
I INTERVIEWED BRIJ Sharma during a season of riots a few years ago. He described constant, casual, racist abuse. The ones in Celtic shirts called him an Orange Paki bastard. The ones in Rangers shirts called him a Fenian Paki bastard. The British soldiers just called him a Paki bastard. He laughed it all off, and served everyone with unfailing courtesy.
He deplored the way sectarian strife was destroying the area. Children used to play in the local park, he said. "Now there's a wall through it to keep the sides apart. There are friends who can't speak to each other. Some of the people who attack me are my childhood friends. Now their children are calling my children racist names."
He said he felt hurt and excluded. He said the people who attacked him "just need someone to pick on". He was, however, extremely popular among his regular customers. After he was killed, they made a shrine outside the shop, around a large photograph of him with his characteristic beaming smile.
In Moneymore, Brij was known only as the quiet man who used to visit Rosemary, who had met him first some years ago when she lived near the shop in Belfast. Their relationship had been off and on but, she says, he was the love of her life.
Heather says her marriage had been troubled, and there had been separations before, but she feels she and Brij would have got back together. "There'd been other women before," she says. "Brij was a charmer."
Rosemary believes the killing was racist. She says she has been intimidated out of Moneymore by friends of the McGlone brothers. Several witnesses withdrew statements. Many people in Moneymore decline to comment. Some say Stephen and Mark McGlone were "just bad boys". Others believe there was more to it.
"It was because he was different, he was coloured," said one woman. "People heard him being called a Paki bastard. That should have come out in court."
Patrick Yu sees the case as a miscarriage of justice, compounded by the fact that the Attorney General has refused the Sharma family's request for a review, claiming they missed a 28-day deadline.
"Nobody informed them of their rights," he says. "This is not the first time." As well as calling for an inquiry, NICEM has referred the case to the Police Ombudsman.
On the day he died, Brij Sharma had gone to his parents' house for a family celebration, a feast of Indian food which his mother spent days preparing. He seemed sad, and left without eating.
"My mum had asked priests in India to look into Brij's horoscope," says Bharat. "Brij was skeptical. They said that April was the most significant in his life. They said he should stay at home, especially towards the end of the month. We begged him to stay that evening. But his fate had called him, and he went."
Rosemary says that later that night, Brij wanted to go home from Moneymore to Belfast. "I persuaded him to stay," she says. "Now I wish I'd let him go."
Brij Sharma's body was cremated and, in October 2004, Bharat brought the ashes back to India and scattered them on the River Ganges.
Race crime: how the North sees it:
The 2004 Race Relations Amendment Northern Ireland provides for an increase in sentence if the offender demonstrates hostility towards the victim based on his or her membership of a group defined by race. The Act states that if an incident is considered racist, there should be no plea-bargaining.
Manslaughter is defined as unintentional killing. Sentencing in the North is left to the discretion of judges but guidelines for England and Wales suggest that in cases where there was a low degree of provocation, a sentence of 10 years to life is appropriate. If there is substantial provocation, the sentence is four to nine years, and if there is a high degree of provocation it is up to four years. Stephen McGlone pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and was sentenced to 17 months in prison for the manslaughter of Brij Sharma.
NICEM has called on local politicians to back its campaign for the Sharma case to be reopened and for an inquiry into how it was handled.