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Relative has fond memories of suspect

from The Orlando Sentinel

By Doris Bloodsworth Sentinel Staff Writer

October 25, 2002

Ed Holiday hero-worshipped his cousin, John Allen Williams.

The two lived across the street from each other on Avenue B in Baton Rouge, La., and attended Scotlandville High School, where Williams was a track star.

"He was my hero," Holiday, 38, said Thursday night. "He was a good, clean-cut guy who always stayed out of trouble. He was a leader."

Shaken after learning that his cousin had been arrested in connection with the Washington-area sniper slayings, Holiday said the family never suspected Williams, now known as John Allen Muhammad, could be behind the shootings.

Holiday said that Muhammad had last visited Baton Rouge in August with 17-year-old John Lee Malvo, whom he described as his "son." Holiday said his cousin seemed different. He was dirty, and his hair needed cutting.

The two always took long, athletic-type bags with them wherever they went. Holiday thinks they may have contained guns.

Muhammad no longer talked about his religion and didn't remove his shoes at the door, which had been his Muslim custom.

Holiday said his cousin told him he ran an aerobics studio in the Caribbean and that he planned to go to Florida to get an aching tooth fixed. He also said he was going to put Malvo in a flight school very soon.

"This time, I thought he was not doing well," Holiday said in a telephone interview. "Being dirty and hungry is one thing but to blow people away is a far stretch."

Holiday said he took Muhammad and Malvo to the bus station to buy tickets to Washington state.

Embraced Islam

Holiday said his cousin's mother died when he was young, and his father was never around. He was raised by his grandfather and his aunt.

Williams married his high-school sweetheart, Carol,four years after his 1978 graduation. He converted to Islam after he left Baton Rouge in 1985, said relatives of Carol Williams.

Muhammad was a member of the Louisiana National Guard from 1978 to 1985 and earned Army honors for marksmanship and Gulf War service. He was disciplined in 1982 for striking a noncommissioned officer. He enlisted in the Army in 1985 and was posted to Fort Lewis in Washington state, then transferred to Germany in 1990, to Fort Ord, Calif., in 1992, and back to Fort Lewis the next year.

Muhammad was trained mainly as a combat engineer, his specialty in the 1991 Gulf War, and also as a metal worker and a water transport specialist. His highest ranking on active duty was sergeant. After his discharge in April 1994, he served in the Oregon National Guard until 1995.

Police think Malvo became an informal stepson to Muhammad because the older man had a live-in relationship with the teen's mother.

Relatives said Muhammad controlled the boy, even dictating what he could eat.

Sheron Norman, a sister of Carol Williams, said the couple had a bitter custody dispute for their son, now 20. In 1994, the son visited Muhammad in Washington state for the summer but failed to return until his mother got a court order.

When he returned, Norman said, the boy had lost 20 pounds after what he described as a militarylike routine of exercise and a strict diet.

Norman said when Malvo, who is thought to have moved from Jamaica in his early teens, was in Baton Rouge in August he followed a strict diet and ate only crackers and honey and nutritional supplements.

"You could tell he was scared," she said. "He was very, very quiet."

Muhammad's second wife, Mildred Muhammad, sought a restraining order after she separated from him in March 2000. She told the court her estranged husband was "irrational" and called her repeatedly, "threatening to destroy my life."

I read in another FR post this morning that Mohammed had also lived in Ft. Myers, FL and possibly spent time in Tampa last year or the year before. I can't find the article right now - anybody have any information on this?

He also was involved in stealing somebody's passport information in Jamaica and using this data to get other immigration documents. The person whose data he stole was a teacher at the Greenville School, which was attended by his children. Greenville? Greendale?

This gets more and more complicated. I hope the government is not just treating this as a psychotic sniper. I just don't have much confidence in the ability of the PC government security services to put two and two together. Very disturbing.

WOW! Interesting.

Money all over the place, Antiguan passports, anti Americanism, travel around the globe, phoney birth certificates that may well now show the *BOY* is actually an adult, Florida flight school, expressions of support of the hijackers on 9-11, the National Capital Region of the US targeted, suspicious people coming and going at all times of the night at the perp's home, affiliation with the Mas Allah mosque in Tacoma...

I could go on and on. This has got to be alpha tango AQ terrorism.

And yet the mainline US media, particularly CNN, having been discredited and shamed around the world due to their "profilers" and insistence on a lone *angry white* so-called ultra rightwing militia/NRA gun nut type, have now switched to inviting in the "psychologists" to explain this one away. The really grasp for straws and try to manage the news in a direction that they want.

If a lone gun nut, they would do anything they can to highlight conspiracies and connections to others and organizations, but if black Americans or illegal immigrants from the Carribean, the shift is going to be away from the organizational and toward the psychological. They will also try to find sympathy for these perps too, if you ask me. Their slanted journalism is so apparant.

Which is why I said, independent fact finding on the net as well as reports from non-Politically correct, non-self censoring news sources abroad is what is going to propel this case into the Light of Truth.

And there is not a damn thing the captains of American national media in NYC or Atlanta can do about it! :-)