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Saturday, May 3, 2025

From prisoner to scholar

Af­ter 15 years in jail for mur­der, Nicholas Khan be­gins new life

by

531 days ago
20231119

Se­nior Re­porter

Shal­iza.has­sanali@guardian.co.tt

Next se­mes­ter, Nicholas Khan will be­gin his Bach­e­lor of Arts in graph­ic de­sign on a schol­ar­ship at the Col­lege of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Ap­plied Arts of T&T (COSTAATT) in Port-of-Spain.

It will be a com­plete turn­around from the 5,462 days he was in­car­cer­at­ed at the Gold­en Grove and Port-of-Spain pris­ons for mur­der.

In the ten months since he was re­leased from jail, Khan, 33, has opened a busi­ness, be­came a COSTAATT ad­vi­sor and reg­u­lar­ly lec­tures to sec­ondary school stu­dents about the bad choic­es he made as a teenag­er and the 15 years he spent be­hind bars.

Khan was sen­tenced to 30 years in jail but on­ly served half of his time be­cause of his ex­em­plary record, role mod­el qual­i­ties and aca­d­e­m­ic pur­suits in prison.

Days be­fore his re­lease, the Sun­day Guardian high­light­ed Khan’s sto­ry, “Nicholas Khan gets a sec­ond chance af­ter serv­ing a re­duced mur­der sen­tence.”

Al­though he has been a free man since Jan­u­ary 14, Khan still feels un­com­fort­able walk­ing the streets.

“It has been a kind of jumpy ex­pe­ri­ence for me. Be­tween the space of Jan­u­ary to now, I could count about 40 youths whom I know per­son­al­ly and had in­ter­ac­tion with in jail, whether we shared the same cell or we went to court to­geth­er, they are all dead. They were killed,” he said.

These killings have left Khan un­easy.

H ad­mit­ted: “I does feel para­noid ... I does re­al­ly feel emo­tion­al when I watch the news and see they make all that jail to come out here and dead, boy. Hon­est­ly, I can’t put my moth­er through that.”

Every day, the for­mer in­mate thanks God for see­ing the sun­rise and for his fam­i­ly who have been his pil­lar of sup­port, strength and mo­ti­va­tion.

While his biggest re­gret was tak­ing a life, Khan knows that had he not been im­pris­oned, he might have lived fast and died young be­cause of his crim­i­nal be­hav­iour.

“It’s this per­son dy­ing on my hands,” Khan said. “If I didn’t end up in jail I would ah dead. If my life didn’t change I don’t think I would be the per­son I am to­day. Every­thing was for a rea­son. I tried not to ques­tion it. I tried to go through my ob­sta­cles. I bite my lip and face my grind.”

The for­mer in­mate now works from home and fo­cus­es on the pos­i­tives.

“I does tell peo­ple close to me that I am not an av­er­age per­son walk­ing the streets. I can’t do that be­cause I don’t know who is on to me,” he said.

“I am not say­ing that some­body on to me ... I have a past and I see things hap­pen to peo­ple that I know, that their past caught up with them. Not be­cause I do­ing so much pos­i­tive it can’t hap­pen to me now. It could hap­pen to me the same way.”

Don’t join gangs

For Khan, be­ing free comes at a price. He plead­ed with gang mem­bers to put down their guns and to think about their ac­tions and lifestyles.

“There is so much I want to tell them. It’s re­al­ly a sad thing that they are just throw­ing away their life like that. I don’t mean to sound hyp­o­crit­i­cal. I was once like them but I woke up to re­al­i­ty in prison be­cause I had no choice. I was in a sit­u­a­tion where I ain’t sure to come back in­to so­ci­ety,” he said.

A few weeks ago, Khan spoke to a group of sec­ondary school stu­dents about his crim­i­nal past, urg­ing them to stay out of trou­ble but they re­fused to lis­ten.

“All I see­ing them is go­ing to jail and dy­ing, that is all I see­ing on their faces be­cause they didn’t even want to hear me out. That is how sad it is. I couldn’t reach out to them. They didn’t un­der­stand the se­ri­ous­ness I was telling them be­cause they want to prove them­selves to the next man in a gang,” he said.

Khan said there were no re­wards for join­ing a gang be­cause “when you join a gang, the leader don’t care about you. You are eas­i­ly re­placed when you get locked up or killed.”

Al­though he was nev­er part of a gang, he said he heard many sto­ries in jail and did some in­tro­spec­tion.

Khan could not read and by age 13, his life start­ed to go down­hill. He start­ed steal­ing from his moth­er and break­ing in­to homes in his neigh­bour­hood.

When he was giv­en an ul­ti­ma­tum to re­turn to ei­ther re­turn to class­es at Diego Mar­tin Ju­nior Sec­ondary School or pur­sue a trade, he in­stead chose to wash cars for $100 a day over his ed­u­ca­tion.

Un­able to get by on those pal­try earn­ings, Khan turned to rob­bing peo­ple. This even­tu­al­ly led him to mur­der in 2017.

Khan re­mem­bered tak­ing a taxi from Ch­agua­nas to Curepe and en­coun­ter­ing busi­ness­man Ricky Rasheed Mo­hammed whom he at­tempt­ed to rob. Mo­hammed, 53, was beat­en with an in­dus­tri­al sta­pler and died of in­juries to his skull and brain.

The po­lice even­tu­al­ly ar­rest­ed and charged Khan who plead­ed guilty to the mur­der and lar­ce­ny of Mo­hammed’s ve­hi­cle.

In prison, Khan met Dr Baz Dreisinger, a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York’s John Jay Col­lege of Crim­i­nal Jus­tice, who in­tro­duced him to col­lege ed­u­ca­tion. His de­sire to learn led him to write three books of po­et­ry, in­clud­ing two, “Tri­als and Tribu­la­tions” and “Am­bi­tion to Over­come”, that re­flect­ed his trou­bled life.

Those books opened doors for Khan and helped him turn his life around. He kept in con­tact with Dreisinger who took him to COSTAATT in Feb­ru­ary to speak about his chal­lenges in­side and out­side of jail to col­lege pres­i­dent Dr Kei­th Nurse.

Nurse of­fered him a schol­ar­ship and an ad­vi­so­ry job to run Link-Up, a prison-to-col­lege pipeline ini­tia­tive.

Next year, Khan will pur­sue his de­gree.

“Be­fore I start the course, I have to go back to the ba­sics of learn­ing Maths and Eng­lish. I was told that I al­ready have a busi­ness mind­set. There were a lot of projects I have put on the back burn­er which I will deal with in 2024. I just need­ed time to be with my fam­i­ly af­ter spend­ing 15 years in jail,” he said.

Link-up of­fers col­lege-lev­el cours­es to in­mates.

“I am ac­tu­al­ly the ad­vi­sor to the project now. Every­thing is still on the ground. We are look­ing to kick it off ear­ly next year,” Khan said, beam­ing with pride.

He is one of 16 for­mer in­car­cer­at­ed lead­ers from around the globe who will vis­it South Africa next March to do tran­si­tion­al work as part of a Glob­al Free­dom Fel­low­ship pro­gramme host­ed by the In­car­cer­a­tion Na­tions Net­work (INN), an ini­tia­tive launched last year by Dreisinger.

INN al­so fund­ed Khan’s reg­is­tered couri­er busi­ness which em­ploys one per­son.


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