This one-square-mile haven for international refugees is the rare town that gets to be known mostly for feel-good stories. People recover and thrive here after fleeing homes bombed into dust and even genocide. Locals welcome strangers, careful not to ask too many personal questions for fear of opening old wounds. Everybody talks about the present and the future at Refuge Coffee, the popular gathering place decorated with art by and about refugees and where refugees serve the brew. If anyone needs help, it’s common for residents to rally, to give money, clothes, food, whatever.
The town’s generosity is its charm, but can it also make Clarkston vulnerable?
This question now dogs some residents after they came together to support a new nonprofit housing boys and young men seeking asylum from Jamaica, a charity that seemed well-intentioned — until it seemed criminal.
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The community assistance began with Amina Osman, a 90-year-old refugee, who has deep scars hidden beneath brilliantly colorful, flowing East African dresses and has devoted this season of her life to caring for the needy around town, especially children. People call her “Momma Amina.” She has a red-white-and-blue business card offering help — any help, just generally speaking.
One day in July 2017, she saw a small of group boys — teens into the typical: Nikes, Wiz Khalifa rhymes, soccer, skateboarding — walking past her house on Rogers Street. As she would with any kids, she called out to them, asking if they needed school supplies. It turned out they lacked that and a lot more, she says: food, money, access to medical care.
This was puzzling because they had just moved here with leaders of new nonprofit, Joint International Regimental Inc. Why would the group have the boys — four teen minors and several over 18 — if it didn’t have the means to care for them?
But Osman knows the rules. She didn’t pry. She reached out to friends, including the mayor, and arranged the wave of support.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
A year and a half later, grim news is spreading about the charity, known as JIRI: The CEO is charged with pushing a 14-year-old boy down a flight of stairs. The secretary is charged with molesting the same boy, as is one of the CEO’s longtime mentees.
Osman and others are horrified that the very hospitality that makes Clarkston’s reputation might’ve drawn such a group to the town and that Clarkston may have unwittingly helped place the boys at risk.
A father figure
Much is still unknown about JIRI — whose leaders deny they’ve done anything wrong whatsoever. Even the Clarkston Police Department’s lead detective on the case, who suspects JIRI’s leader brought the boys to America with bad intentions, openly admits he hasn’t exactly figured out what those intentions could be. He says he is sure only of the charges he filed.
What is abundantly clear is that people like Osman feel taken advantage of by the charity, founded by CEO Kevin Marsh.
He’s a former Jamaican police officer who has the look of a middle-aged disciplined cop or military man: fit and clean-cut. While on the force in Kingston, he also formed a cadet program called National Interschool Brigade Movement. The group’s mission is to shape young people into “disciplined and responsible individuals through meaningful training.”
He was respected and praised by cadets, who called him a father figure, even a hero. Once, at a banquet, a man in white gloves presented Marsh with an honor: a gleaming sword.
But his reputation took a hit in 2012, when police on his own force accused him of pulling a gun on a 15-year-old cadet and molesting him. Marsh faced charges of weapon violations and buggery, the Jamaican crime of sodomy. In 2014, defense attorneys suggested they had evidence of cops framing Marsh to get him off the force, according to the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper. Prosecutors dropped the charges, though authorities won’t release any details about the case.
By 2016, Marsh had started JIRI, a certified nonprofit, in the U.S. with Andre Anderson, who is a decade younger and also from Jamaica, listed as the group’s secretary.
In summer 2017, Marsh, Anderson and the boys arrived in Clarkston.
Something amiss
They all lived in a cramped apartment on Church Street, a few hundred yards from JIRI’s office: a little cinder-block building, smaller than a lot of home garages. They had a classroom and sometimes sat talking around a large wooden conference room table wedged into a tiny room with painting of a cross on the wall. Marsh took the boys around town to meet people and to attend community events.
They soon attracted the attention of Mayor Ted Terry, the popular 30-something whose love of progressive policy and refugees landed him an appearance on Netflix's hit "Queer Eye." Terry is fond of working with local nonprofits and Clarkston is home to several large, widely-praised ones. But Terry says he's also seen a few start-ups that appeared unorganized, if well-meaning, as JIRI seemed. He heard about it from his friend, Osman.
The boys didn’t use her Momma Amina nickname. They called her grandma. She says she bought them chocolate and a soccer ball. She told them not to drink too much soda. She visited with them at Refuge Coffee. She directed them to the free clinic so they could have a doctor. When she heard they needed money, she called Terry and asked if he would hire some of them to do small tasks for his 2017 re-election campaign, which he says he did, paying $15 an hour.
Osman and Terry say they heard no complaints from the boys, but Osman grew concerned the first time she spent time at the little building on Church Street.
She had gotten worshipers at a mosque to donate meat to the boys. Grills fired up. Then several men arrived with cases of alcohol, Osman says, and she realized the barbecue was for JIRI’s leaders and their friends, not the boys.
Osman, who wears dark thick-rimmed glasses and is awful at hiding emotion, felt tears drop from her face. She was heartbroken, confused and didn’t know what to do.
She called her taxi driver: “Come pick me up.”
Later, she called the same friends she’d earlier asked to help JIRI and told them to back off, that she had a bad feeling.
The tip
On Jan. 3, Det. James McKinney met a tearful witness, a middle-aged woman who had been been working with JIRI. The witness seemed terrified, telling about alleged child abuse and how Marsh knew powerful officials in Jamaica, according to the detective.
It was dark when McKinney drove from the police station, also on Church Street, less than a mile to the apartment. When the door opened, the smell struck him, he says: the stench of filth, a locker room, accompanied by moldy food.
McKinney says he saw roaches everywhere and empty booze bottles strewn. At the bottom of the stairs to the second floor he noted two busted spots in the wall, which he presumed were where the boy had crashed after the push.
The Division of Family Children Services took the four boys who were under 18 into custody. The older ones stayed behind.
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Knowing the minors were safe, the detective spent months trying to unravel the case, calling friends at the FBI, GBI and elsewhere for advice. He recalls several saying it smacked of human trafficking. He thought it could be a failed money racket because JIRI went around asking for money.
He took Osman aside at a city council meeting and asked what she knew, since he’d heard she had helped the group. She told him she’d stopped associating with them.
McKinney did 10 forensic interviews with the boys.
“My perception is there was more abuse (than the one boy), but people are scared to talk,” McKinney says.
The detective charged Marsh with misdemeanor battery for the alleged push down the stairs. Anderson and one of Marsh’s longtime mentees, Neil Clarke, 23, were both charged with felony child molestation for allegedly touching the child’s genitals while he was trying to do his homework.
Repeated attempts by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to reach Clarke, who like the others is out on bond, have been unsuccessful.
In messages on Facebook, Anderson accused a reporter of harassing him and said his lawyer would be in touch.
He answered just one question:
“Did you molest the child?”
“No.”
A man with a sword
Marsh stands in the driveway of an average brick home in a middle-class neighborhood in south Clayton County. This rental is where he — and JIRI’s address — moved after leaving Clarkston.
With sweat beading on his forehead under the sun, he agrees to answer questions from a reporter. He bristles at the first one, which is about JIRI.
“But the organization has nothing to do with the situation in Clarkston,” he says.
He’s saying the boys had nothing to do with his JIRI, that, in fact, no young person has ever had anything to do with JIRI because JIRI exists only on paper right now.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Why is there a photo online of the boys — and Marsh — gathered for a “JIRI weekly meeting”? Marsh says the caption must’ve been an error. Why did he and Anderson go around Clarkston presenting themselves as the heads of JIRI? Marsh says they were building the organization up so it could one day get running.
What matters most, of course, is what happened to the boys.
Marsh vehemently denies he, Anderson or Clarke did anything to the boys but treat them well. He says the apartment was clean and safe. He says the boys were healthy, excelling in school and well taken care of, mostly with money from his own pocket.
He also says this: “Everybody knows that an allegation that you can easily get away with (falsifying is) child molestation.”
The situation is a setup, just like the buggery case in Jamaica.
Why?
Marsh says the witness, who is also from Jamaica, made it up to get a special visa to stay in the U.S. while assisting police. Immigration officials declined to say if the woman got such a visa.
“I am not afraid of allegations,” Marsh says.
He shrugs his shoulders and concludes: “Simple.”
Clarkston’s scars
The mayor worries the JIRI ordeal could make some in Clarkston skeptical of other groups that might be totally legitimate. That’s the “last thing you want” in this town where so many people need help, he says. Terry plans to keep trumpeting the organizations he knows he can trust.
Osman is hurt by the experience but says she'll carry on helping whoever needs her. She has to help.
One day on her porch, she explains why.
She lifts the hem of one of those long, bright dresses to reveal the spots where a soldier’s lashes tore her shins. She tugs her collar to show a similar scar on her throat. She tells how her children had the same torture brought onto them that day in the late 1990s, except her children died. Osman’s torture is now the memory of them, raped and murdered in front of her.
By helping the boys on Church Street, she felt, in some cosmic way, as if she were racing back through time to wrest guns from the soldiers’ hands, perhaps a sword.
Across the road, children who’ve just gotten out of school holler loud and play in the sun.
“I’m still missing those kids,” Osman says.
Behind her glasses, tear begin to fall.
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