Bogus Gibbons jailed for ten months
The man who was wrongfully deported here last year and had claimed to be an American born in Louisiana named Edgar Garfield Gibbons, has been positively identified as Jamaican James Dean Collins and will serve a ten-month prison term for his lies. Collins was yesterday sentenced to ten months imprisonment by a federal court for illegal admission. After serving his sentence Collins will be turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for deportation proceedings, after consultation with the authorities in Jamaica where he was born, the INS said. The charge of illegal admission was instituted after he was returned to the United States from Guyana where he had been deported in April 1999 in the belief that he was a Guyanese who had migrated to the US. However, Stabroek News had discovered a Guyanese of the same name living and working in the New York Tri-State area. The Guyanese Gibbons was born on November 5, 1958 and had migrated legally to the US. It appears that his records became confused with the Jamaican Collins. An INS official told Stabroek News yesterday that the agency had been able to identify Collins through birth records in Jamaica and through other birth records of his children who were in the US. The official said that two of Collins' children had either a first or last name similar to his. The official said that the INS had been unable to determine when Collins entered the United States, but ascertained that he had assumed the name Gibbons before he left Jamaica. The official said too that based on his criminal record obtained from other agencies, Collins had been using the name of Gibbons in the US for well over 20 years. The mother of Collins' last child, Denita Turner, had told Stabroek News in April, that she had been informed by the FBI that his real name was Collins and that he was born in Jamaica on November 15, 1958. She said that his true identity had been revealed to the FBI by another woman with whom he has an eight-year-old daughter. Turner told this newspaper that FBI agents had informed her that they had obtained a birth certificate for Collins which showed that he was born on November 15, 1958 and was a Jamaican. However, Collins, had claimed that the name was one of several that the FBI had suggested to him since he returned to the United States from Guyana. After it was determined that Collins was not a Guyanese, the INS had called on the FBI and Interpol to help in ascertaining his true identity and nationality. Collins was returned to the US at the insistence of Home Affairs Minister, Ronald Gajraj, after it was established that he was not Guyanese and had been wrongly deported here by the INS.
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