The teen who ignited a frenzy of hatred in Howard Beach that left a black man dead 15 years ago now “bitterly regrets” the murder.
Jon Lester, 32, served 15 years of his 15- to 30-year manslaughter sentence in the racially charged death of 23-year-old Michael Griffith in the Queens neighborhood on Dec. 20, 1986.
Released earlier this year for good behavior, he was deported to his native England May 29, where he toils anonymously in a factory – just one step ahead of his gruesome history.
“I bitterly regret what I did,” Lester said in an interview with a London newspaper. “But I don’t suppose I will ever escape my past.”
Lester was a baby-faced 17-year-old when a car carrying three black men broke down in his largely white neighborhood.
Shouting, “Kill the n- – – – -s!” Lester chased Griffith onto the Belt Parkway, where he was hit and killed by a car. Griffith’s friend Cedric Sandiford was cornered and beaten to a pulp with baseball bats and tree branches.
Lester, nicknamed “Johnny English,” now lives in Lancashire and has a dark-skinned, Bangladeshi girlfriend. He has tried to put the past behind him, and insists he was never the racist monster portrayed in the press.
“I know this race thing is following me wherever I go, but I have never been a racist,” the scar-faced Lester said. “I was very young when it all happened. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
The notorious incident inflamed racial tensions in New York that escalated when murder charges were dropped to manslaughter. But Lester insists he was just a cocky teenager who lost control.
“There was certainly no racial element in it, as I recall,” Lester told London’s Sunday Mirror. “It was only the politicians that turned it into one.”
A troubled young man, Lester was way over his head, with his life in constant danger during those desperate early years in jail. So he decided to make something of his life.
Learning guitar, studying, and becoming a voracious reader made the long days in prison pass more quickly. More importantly, he said, he helped other inmates overcome their simmering anger.
Today, Lester only wants to be left alone with the uneventful life he has created for himself in northeastern England.
Racism – and his heinous crime – now sickens him, Lester said, adding he can never escape it. When he returned to England, someone was stabbed near his father’s home, and the race-baiting National Party celebrated the crime.
“I found the whole thing sickening. I have never been a racist, no matter what people say or think,” he said. “In jail in America, I met many black people who I am proud to call my friends.
“If my girlfriend can live with what I did, why can’t everyone else?”