Lenford "Steve" Harvey was a Jamaican activist who campaigned for the rights of those living with HIV/AIDS in Jamaican society. In November 2005, he was abducted from his home and murdered in a robbery that some commentators believed was also a homophobic hate crime. Harvey, an openly gay man, had worked for Jamaica AIDS Support for Life (JASL), since 1997 becoming the group's coordinator for Kingston. In this position, he focused on distributing information and services surrounding HIV/AIDS to the most marginalised sectors of Jamaican society, among them prisoners, sex workers, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. In 2005, he was selected as Jamaica's project coordinator for the Latin America and Caribbean Council of AIDS Service Organizations. Harvey was praised for his work. According to Peter Tatchell of the British LGBT rights organisation OutRage!, "It is thanks to the efforts of Steve and his colleagues that many Jamaican men and women - both gay and straight - have not contracted HIV. They have helped save hundreds of lives."[1]
In November 2005, three men carrying guns broke into Harvey's home, removing any valuables they could find. They asked him if he was gay, and when he refused to respond to them, they kidnapped him, later shooting him dead and dumping the body elsewhere. The police subsequently arrested four individuals and charged them with murder in the furtherance of a robbery. The accused remained in police custody for almost ten years before the case came to court. At that point, the police dropped their murder charges against two of the accused. The other two, Dwayne Owen and Andre West, went on trial and were found unanimously guilty of murder by a jury. Although prosecutors had requested capital punishment in the case, the judge instead sentenced them to life in prison with a minimum of thirty years before becoming eligible for parole. They remain in prison, as of 2022.