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Jon Lester, Convicted in Howard Beach Race Attack, Dies at 48
By SAM ROBERTSOCT. 23, 2017
Photo
Jon Lester in Civil Court in Queens in June 1988 for his part in attacks against three black men in Howard Beach in 1986.CreditBill Turnbull
Early on the morning of Dec. 20, 1986, a baby-faced white teenager returned to a neighborhood birthday party after encountering three black men whose car had broken down on a deserted stretch of Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach, Queens.
“There’s ******s on the boulevard,” the teenager, Jon Lester, a transplanted English 17-year-old, was quoted as telling the beered-up partygoers, adding (and inserting an expletive), “Let’s go kill them.”
According to later courtroom testimony, the 5-foot-4 Mr. Lester was a ringleader of a dozen white teenagers who jumped into three cars and ambushed the black men at a nearby pizza parlor.
The gang mercilessly chased one man, Michael Griffith, 23, who escaped by running onto a busy highway, where he was struck by a car and killed. Another man in the car, Timothy Grimes, outran his pursuers. But they caught and savagely beat the third black man, Cedric Sandiford, 36, with a baseball bat, a tire iron and a tree limb.
“My God, I have a son like you, 17 years old,” Mr. Sandiford was said to have begged. “Please don’t kill me.”
Photo
Michael Griffith in an undated photograph. He was chased onto a highway and struck and killed by a passing car. Credit United Press International
The attack inflamed simmering tensions between blacks and whites in New York City; sparked angry marches by protesters, who were met by local residents outraged in turn at being tarred as bigots; and, with the case drawing worldwide attention, transformed predominantly white Howard Beach into a antonym for racial hatred.
Mayor Edward I. Koch compared the attack to a lynching.
After one participant testified for the prosecution, Mr. Lester, who had pleaded not guilty, was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and first-degree assault. He was sentenced in 1988 to the maximum prison term, 10 to 30 years. Two others were convicted of manslaughter as well.
In state prison, Mr. Lester earned a general equivalency diploma and an associate college degree in business administration. He learned to play the guitar and composed an ode to Mr. Griffith’s mother.
In 2001, grown by then to 5 feet 10 inches tall and 170 pounds, Mr. Lester was paroled and deported back to Britain, where he had lived until he was 14 before immigrating to the United States with his siblings, mother and stepfather.
In England he moved in briefly with his father, who had remained there after the others left for New York. He got a menial factory job, earned a degree in engineering and started his own electrical services company. He went on to live with a woman in Ashton-Under-Lyne, a town on the River Tame in Greater Manchester, and had three children with her.
Mr. Lester died on Aug. 14. Though the Coroners Service for the Manchester South District said on Monday that the cause was still under investigation, the family said it was suicide. Mr. Lester was 48.
Photo
Jon Lester, center, with two unidentified friends outside a courtroom in Queens. CreditChester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
“He suffered from depression due to the fact that he was wrongly convicted,” his sister Jayne Lester said in a telephone interview from Florida, where she lives. “He was just tormented. He was never the same person.”
Her brother was haunted by “guilt dreams,” she said, but was not a coldblooded killer.
“He really wasn’t a bad person the way they made him out to be,” she said. “He wouldn’t tell on anybody, and they had to blame someone.”
Jonathan Louis Lester was born on July 6, 1969, in Wales to John Lester and the former Jean Pollard.
The Life Events listing on his Facebook page consists of only two dates: 1984, when he started John Adams High School in Queens, and 1987, when he said he left school.
He is survived by his parents; two sisters, Julia and Jayne; a stepbrother, Peter; and his three young children. His mother, who also lives in Florida, remarried and is now known as Jean Holmes.
“What happened in Howard Beach — and make no mistake about it, no ifs, ands or buts about it — it was a racial incident that triggered off this violence,” Justice Thomas A. Demakos said in sentencing Mr. Lester in New York State Supreme Court in Queens.
Declaring that Mr. Lester showed “no remorse, no sense of guilt, no shame, no fear,” the judge asked, “What kind of individual do I have before me, who, after witnessing a young black man get crushed by a car, continues his reckless conduct by savagely beating another black male with a bat?”
Mr. Sandiford, who, like Mr. Griffith, was from Brooklyn, survived the beating. He married Mr. Griffith’s mother, Jean, and died of AIDS in 1991.
“In my heart I’m sorry to hear of his death,” Mr. Griffith’s mother, now Jean Griffith Sandiford, said of Mr. Lester in a telephone interview on Monday. “Regardless of what happened, I always forgave them.”
Mr. Lester later admitted to beating Mr. Sandiford with the bat. But he did not chase Mr. Griffith onto the highway, he told The Daily News in 1996, and was unaware while pursuing Mr. Sandiford that Mr. Griffith had been struck by a car.
He added, however: “I accept responsibility for Michael Griffith’s death. If we hadn’t chased him, he wouldn’t have died.”
Charles J. Hynes, the special prosecutor in the case, rejected Mr. Lester’s version of events and expressed dismay at his release from prison after he had been rejected four times for parole.
Photo
Protesters and neighborhood residents gathered outside a pizzeria at 157th Street and Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach, Queens, in the wake of the racial attack. CreditDith Pran/The New York Times
“Jon Lester can try and rewrite history all he wants,” Mr. Hynes wrote in an email on Monday. “Some would say 15 years’ imprisonment is significant punishment, but after 15 years he was alive, and Michael Griffith is dead.”
During those 15 years, mostly at Wende Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison near Buffalo, and the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, N.Y., in Sullivan County, Mr. Lester studied and counseled other prisoners on anger management.
In jailhouse interviews and shortly after his release, he insisted that he had never been a racist and expressed regret for the attack, something the sentencing judge said he had failed to do after his conviction.
“I was just a typical cocky teenager who got involved in a situation which I couldn’t control,” he told the British newspaper The Sunday Mirror in 2001.
“I’m not that baby-faced thug anymore,” he told The Daily News.
“I’m responsible for someone being dead,” he said in an interview with The Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y. “I can never undo that, and I will live with it every day forever.”
Mr. Lester remembered reading that Mr. Griffith had two sisters.
“I have two sisters,” he told The News. “It was Christmas week. I thought I had ruined Christmas. I had probably ruined Christmas forever. I had probably ruined Christmas for the Griffith family forever, too.”
Photo
Jon Lester, who became an electrical engineer after he was released from prison, at his office in Manchester, England.
He emerged from prison scarred from fights with fellow inmates, who he said had attacked him, and armed with a business degree, which he had earned from Sullivan County Community College with a straight-A average. He had also recovered from Crohn’s disease, a bowel disorder that required several operations.
After returning to England, he attended Stockport College in Manchester before starting his electrical services business.
“In his last days he was a successful and caring businessman with a high degree of integrity who tried to live his life and give back to society,” his sister Jayne Lester said. “He always regarded the Howard Beach case as a huge tragedy to everyone involved.”
She added, “The fact that he couldn’t come back to America is basically what killed him, because he couldn’t be with his family.”
Mr. Lester’s family did not publish an obituary; his sister announced the death on Facebook. Among those who expressed condolences online was Victoria Gotti, a former neighbor and the daughter of the deceased Mafia boss John Gotti.
Ms. Lester said she had returned from England a few weeks ago with her brother’s ashes.
“At last,” she wrote, “he will be at rest in the U.S.A. Where his heart was and always wanted to be.”
I remember reading this shyt with my parents in a magazine and sitting down with them and my brother on what to do if shyt pops off like this for us. 
By SAM ROBERTSOCT. 23, 2017
Photo
Jon Lester in Civil Court in Queens in June 1988 for his part in attacks against three black men in Howard Beach in 1986.CreditBill Turnbull
Early on the morning of Dec. 20, 1986, a baby-faced white teenager returned to a neighborhood birthday party after encountering three black men whose car had broken down on a deserted stretch of Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach, Queens.
“There’s ******s on the boulevard,” the teenager, Jon Lester, a transplanted English 17-year-old, was quoted as telling the beered-up partygoers, adding (and inserting an expletive), “Let’s go kill them.”
According to later courtroom testimony, the 5-foot-4 Mr. Lester was a ringleader of a dozen white teenagers who jumped into three cars and ambushed the black men at a nearby pizza parlor.
The gang mercilessly chased one man, Michael Griffith, 23, who escaped by running onto a busy highway, where he was struck by a car and killed. Another man in the car, Timothy Grimes, outran his pursuers. But they caught and savagely beat the third black man, Cedric Sandiford, 36, with a baseball bat, a tire iron and a tree limb.
“My God, I have a son like you, 17 years old,” Mr. Sandiford was said to have begged. “Please don’t kill me.”
Photo
Michael Griffith in an undated photograph. He was chased onto a highway and struck and killed by a passing car. Credit United Press International
The attack inflamed simmering tensions between blacks and whites in New York City; sparked angry marches by protesters, who were met by local residents outraged in turn at being tarred as bigots; and, with the case drawing worldwide attention, transformed predominantly white Howard Beach into a antonym for racial hatred.
Mayor Edward I. Koch compared the attack to a lynching.
After one participant testified for the prosecution, Mr. Lester, who had pleaded not guilty, was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and first-degree assault. He was sentenced in 1988 to the maximum prison term, 10 to 30 years. Two others were convicted of manslaughter as well.
In state prison, Mr. Lester earned a general equivalency diploma and an associate college degree in business administration. He learned to play the guitar and composed an ode to Mr. Griffith’s mother.
In 2001, grown by then to 5 feet 10 inches tall and 170 pounds, Mr. Lester was paroled and deported back to Britain, where he had lived until he was 14 before immigrating to the United States with his siblings, mother and stepfather.
In England he moved in briefly with his father, who had remained there after the others left for New York. He got a menial factory job, earned a degree in engineering and started his own electrical services company. He went on to live with a woman in Ashton-Under-Lyne, a town on the River Tame in Greater Manchester, and had three children with her.
Mr. Lester died on Aug. 14. Though the Coroners Service for the Manchester South District said on Monday that the cause was still under investigation, the family said it was suicide. Mr. Lester was 48.
Photo
Jon Lester, center, with two unidentified friends outside a courtroom in Queens. CreditChester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
“He suffered from depression due to the fact that he was wrongly convicted,” his sister Jayne Lester said in a telephone interview from Florida, where she lives. “He was just tormented. He was never the same person.”
Her brother was haunted by “guilt dreams,” she said, but was not a coldblooded killer.
“He really wasn’t a bad person the way they made him out to be,” she said. “He wouldn’t tell on anybody, and they had to blame someone.”
Jonathan Louis Lester was born on July 6, 1969, in Wales to John Lester and the former Jean Pollard.
The Life Events listing on his Facebook page consists of only two dates: 1984, when he started John Adams High School in Queens, and 1987, when he said he left school.
He is survived by his parents; two sisters, Julia and Jayne; a stepbrother, Peter; and his three young children. His mother, who also lives in Florida, remarried and is now known as Jean Holmes.
“What happened in Howard Beach — and make no mistake about it, no ifs, ands or buts about it — it was a racial incident that triggered off this violence,” Justice Thomas A. Demakos said in sentencing Mr. Lester in New York State Supreme Court in Queens.
Declaring that Mr. Lester showed “no remorse, no sense of guilt, no shame, no fear,” the judge asked, “What kind of individual do I have before me, who, after witnessing a young black man get crushed by a car, continues his reckless conduct by savagely beating another black male with a bat?”
Mr. Sandiford, who, like Mr. Griffith, was from Brooklyn, survived the beating. He married Mr. Griffith’s mother, Jean, and died of AIDS in 1991.
“In my heart I’m sorry to hear of his death,” Mr. Griffith’s mother, now Jean Griffith Sandiford, said of Mr. Lester in a telephone interview on Monday. “Regardless of what happened, I always forgave them.”
Mr. Lester later admitted to beating Mr. Sandiford with the bat. But he did not chase Mr. Griffith onto the highway, he told The Daily News in 1996, and was unaware while pursuing Mr. Sandiford that Mr. Griffith had been struck by a car.
He added, however: “I accept responsibility for Michael Griffith’s death. If we hadn’t chased him, he wouldn’t have died.”
Charles J. Hynes, the special prosecutor in the case, rejected Mr. Lester’s version of events and expressed dismay at his release from prison after he had been rejected four times for parole.
Photo
Protesters and neighborhood residents gathered outside a pizzeria at 157th Street and Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach, Queens, in the wake of the racial attack. CreditDith Pran/The New York Times
“Jon Lester can try and rewrite history all he wants,” Mr. Hynes wrote in an email on Monday. “Some would say 15 years’ imprisonment is significant punishment, but after 15 years he was alive, and Michael Griffith is dead.”
During those 15 years, mostly at Wende Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison near Buffalo, and the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, N.Y., in Sullivan County, Mr. Lester studied and counseled other prisoners on anger management.
In jailhouse interviews and shortly after his release, he insisted that he had never been a racist and expressed regret for the attack, something the sentencing judge said he had failed to do after his conviction.
“I was just a typical cocky teenager who got involved in a situation which I couldn’t control,” he told the British newspaper The Sunday Mirror in 2001.
“I’m not that baby-faced thug anymore,” he told The Daily News.
“I’m responsible for someone being dead,” he said in an interview with The Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y. “I can never undo that, and I will live with it every day forever.”
Mr. Lester remembered reading that Mr. Griffith had two sisters.
“I have two sisters,” he told The News. “It was Christmas week. I thought I had ruined Christmas. I had probably ruined Christmas forever. I had probably ruined Christmas for the Griffith family forever, too.”
Photo
Jon Lester, who became an electrical engineer after he was released from prison, at his office in Manchester, England.
He emerged from prison scarred from fights with fellow inmates, who he said had attacked him, and armed with a business degree, which he had earned from Sullivan County Community College with a straight-A average. He had also recovered from Crohn’s disease, a bowel disorder that required several operations.
After returning to England, he attended Stockport College in Manchester before starting his electrical services business.
“In his last days he was a successful and caring businessman with a high degree of integrity who tried to live his life and give back to society,” his sister Jayne Lester said. “He always regarded the Howard Beach case as a huge tragedy to everyone involved.”
She added, “The fact that he couldn’t come back to America is basically what killed him, because he couldn’t be with his family.”
Mr. Lester’s family did not publish an obituary; his sister announced the death on Facebook. Among those who expressed condolences online was Victoria Gotti, a former neighbor and the daughter of the deceased Mafia boss John Gotti.
Ms. Lester said she had returned from England a few weeks ago with her brother’s ashes.
“At last,” she wrote, “he will be at rest in the U.S.A. Where his heart was and always wanted to be.”
I remember reading this shyt with my parents in a magazine and sitting down with them and my brother on what to do if shyt pops off like this for us.
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he was let out of jail??
man, fukk this world and big fukk you to that motherfukker.
fukkin bytch
