Jamaica's Violence Waits Outside Prison Walls For NY Inmate

By Rachel Rippetoe | December 5, 2025

After serving more than three decades in a New York state prison, Eric Tolliver wants to be excited that his sentence is nearing its end. Getting out should be a moment of joyful reunion with his sisters and his mother, who have all been anxiously awaiting his return home.

But unfortunately for Tolliver, they're not the only ones waiting.

Because Tolliver is a noncitizen, it's likely that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers will be at the gates of Shawangunk Correctional Facility ready to pick him up and deport him to his home country of Jamaica.

There, he says, a host of enemies will be on the lookout for him, ready to kill.

"If I go back to Jamaica, I know within 30 days, I will be hunted, I will be fighting," Tolliver told Law360. "Either I get killed or I'm going to have to be on the offense, period."

Tolliver is serving a minimum sentence of 33 years and four months for the 1993 murder of Marshall Solomon in Syracuse, New York, a crime he is adamant he did not commit. Solomon, a local record store owner who authorities identified as a drug dealer, was shot six times outside a local club.

Tolliver will be eligible for parole in April 2027, although the 55-year-old says he could be released early on good behavior as soon as next year.

But whether Tolliver would actually want to get out sooner, or at all, is a tricky question for him and his family.

While "Eric Tolliver" is the name listed on his record, it's just one of many aliases. He was born Gerald Anthony King, which derives from his father's name: Fitzgerald King. Because of his father's role as an enforcer for the Jamaica Labor Party — one of two prominent political parties in Jamaica whose rivalry has frequently exploded into violence — King is a name that Tolliver said was "well-feared" in Jamaica, and he and his siblings have paid the price for being born into it.

Over the past two decades, his father, and three of Tolliver's younger brothers have been shot and killed in his home country. These killings stem from the political conflict, according to Tolliver, his sisters and his mother.

Tolliver's family, who call him Tony, say that if he's sent back to Jamaica, they fear he'll almost certainly be next.

"They're still sending threats, even while Tony is in jail," Tolliver's sister Sindy King told Law360. "They send messages that the minute he lands in Jamaica, he's dead."

In 2023, there were about 67,000 unauthorized immigrants incarcerated across the United States, according to the Cato Institute. And there were about 59,000 legal immigrants incarcerated. Both populations have historically had a difficult time staying in the country upon their release, with laws preventing those with serious criminal records from renewing their green cards or visas, or seeking asylum.

At the time of his arrest, Tolliver was married to a U.S. citizen and was in the process of establishing permanent residency, but he said his application was paused indefinitely after he went to prison.

This summer, anticipating his release, he applied for political asylum. But, under current immigration law, his murder conviction bars him from this form of relief. The one potential workaround would be to get his conviction vacated. Tolliver has been trying to prove his innocence for 20 years to this end, but has all but exhausted his limited pathways to exoneration. He has two Hail Marys left: a long-shot U.S. Supreme Court petition and the hope that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul might pardon him.

According to his family and several letters from his supervisors in prison, Tolliver has been a model prisoner. While incarcerated, he taught himself to read and write and has fashioned himself into a prolific jailhouse lawyer, filing hundreds of briefs and motions on behalf of both himself and his fellow prisoners. It's the kind of behavior that, at least in a more immigrant-friendly state like New York, could be rewarded at one time with a path toward legal residency. But experts say there's now almost no leniency for anyone in prison with shaky immigration status.

"It's not a matter of 'if they're going to be deported,' it's when," Goldstein & Orr's John Gilmore, a criminal defense lawyer in San Antonio, told Law360. "And they will automatically be deported almost across the board with what's going on in our government right now."

Safer in Prison

In October 2019, Tolliver's younger half-brother, Rollin 'Superman' Walker, was shot and killed in Montego Bay while driving, more than a decade after Tolliver's father, Fitzgerald King, was shot dead in his sleep. Tolliver's family said King's legacy as a powerful "don" or enforcer in May Pen — a town in the parish of Clarendon — was to blame.

"He was the top guy," Tolliver's sister Sindy King said. "When anybody spoke his name, people got scared. They ran. Even the police were afraid of him. He was just that type of man."

Kareen Williams, an adjunct professor at City College of New York who has studied Jamaica's political violence, said this political system of dons and garrisons each loyal to one of the two parties, JLP and the People's National Party, fueled one of Jamaica's most violent periods in the 1980s. Even today, this model persists, Williams said.

"There is violence instigated on both sides," Williams told Law360. "And unfortunately men and women, it doesn't matter, if you're targeted by the other side, you could end up dead."

Tolliver's father was known as a former heavyweight boxing champion and promoter, but he had some ties to a few of Jamaica's high-ranking politicians, like Mike Henry, the longest-standing member of the Jamaican Parliament, and Joel Williams, the mayor of May Pen, who both spoke at King's funeral in 2006, according to photographs of the event reviewed by Law360.


"[King] was always in politics and that was a thing that was raging in those years when I was raising my kids," Tolliver's mother, Ongeal Black, said. "I had to be moving my kids to different places because of fear of them being killed, because of the name they carry."

While Tolliver says he was able to escape to the Bahamas as a teenager, and eventually send for Sindy as well, his younger brothers stayed in Jamaica and met a different fate, according to news reports and death records reviewed by Law360.

First it was Richard King, 23, who in October 2001 was "shot dead by gunmen" in the parish of Granville St. James.

Then, in 2006, Tolliver said his father was able to travel to the United States to visit him in prison, and told his son he thought he was seeing him for the last time. A week or so later, after returning to Jamaica, King died from gunshot wounds.

Walker would be killed over a decade later, and in 2022, Tolliver's brother Kevin King was shot dead as well. Of the more than 20 children born to Fitzgerald King, Tolliver's family said he is the only son who has not at least had an attempt on his life.

And they say this is largely because Tolliver has been locked away for three decades.

Kenneth Bernard, another Jamaican in Shawangunk whom Tolliver is helping appeal his life sentence, said that while he and Tolliver are "in the same boat" when it comes to likely being deported back to Jamaica if freed from prison, Tolliver's removal would be more lethal.

"Tony's situation is more serious," Bernard, who in his youth would have been Tolliver's rival as a member of the People's National Party, told Law360. "Some of the people who killed his father are still around, and they're thinking, 'I don't know what he might or might not do, so we just got to kill him too.'"

Both have already seen it happen to one friend, Marlon "Sniper" Dyer.

In April, Dyer was gunned down in Kingston. According to The Jamaica Star, Dyer had been deported to Jamaica in November 2024 after serving a 21-year sentence for murder in New York state prisons, most recently in Shawangunk, Tolliver said.

The American Dream

Tolliver was 16 when he left Jamaica for the Bahamas in the 1980s, but he said the politics and the violence followed him.

"You can't separate [from the JLP]," he said. "That's your life. We're like a bloodline."

It was the party that facilitated his move out of May Pen, Tolliver said. A JLP official brought him to the islands for various jobs and he said he was quickly drawn into the drug trade, picking up and dropping off narcotics in speed boats and bi-planes throughout the hundreds of unpopulated islands.

But Tolliver said at the time all he really cared about was getting his mother, whom he viewed as an innocent, out of Jamaica. Once he was able to send for her, he used a Bahamian passport to travel to the United States, which he said was easy at the time. Unlike Jamaicans, who would need a special visa to enter the country, Bahamians, like U.S. citizens, had the freedom to travel almost anywhere.

Not yet 20 years old, Tolliver said he felt free and unconfined in the States. He traveled all over, living in Miami, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Queens, New York. He admits he was no angel at the time.

"I was a drug dealer. That was my thing," Tolliver said. "I still had a lot of these guys around me, members of the party. Some of them because they know my father, some of them I met here. Just because of whose son I am, they gravitate to me. They used to call me 'Fitzy Boy.'"

At the time, the Jamaican political parties had splintered off into the U.S. to form two notorious rival gangs in New York: the Shower Posse, formed by members of the JLP like Tolliver, and the Spangler Posse, members of the PNP like Bernard.

"We come over and we're supposed to leave certain nonsense behind us," Bernard said. "But the ones we were running from all came to America."

At the time, law enforcement across the Empire State was waging a war against the Jamaican gangs, with an emphasis on taking as many members, or suspected members, off the street as possible.

By 1993, Tolliver already had a pending charge for attempted murder in Brooklyn. The charge was dropped when he moved to Syracuse, where he would then be charged for shooting a man over drug money, which Tolliver claimed was self-defense.

He was out on bail in September 1993 when record store owner Marshall Solomon was killed. According to police reports at the time, Solomon was shot six times after being dragged from his moving car outside a club called Manhattan Lounge in Syracuse. It was around midnight.

According to news reports at the time, police were stymied in the case until a few months later, when they got in touch with Bradley Hunt, a friend of Tolliver's in Colorado, who told prosecutors that Tolliver had confessed to the killing over the phone a few days after it happened.

In his innocence petition in New York state court, Tolliver said Hunt, an old friend from Jamaica, was actually a fugitive at the time. Tolliver obtained a letter between the Onondaga County prosecutors on his case stating that Hunt was "doing whatever possible to achieve a clean slate" in reference to his two arrest warrants at the time.

But prosecutors had Hunt's testimony, as well as that of Talbert Simpson, who was initially charged with the murder until he identified Tolliver and another accomplice, Tolliver's cousin Clifton Gordon. But perhaps most damningly, a ballistic expert said the shell casings found at the scene matched the gun that police found on Tolliver when he was arrested that December.

Tolliver claimed Simpson, who was a friend, had been borrowing his gun at the time, but it was his word against Simpson's.

According to news reports, it took the jury only 90 minutes to convict Tolliver in June 1994. The following month, Judge William J. Burke sentenced him to 25 years to life.

Layers of Punishment

As a member of the Shower Posse, Tolliver fit the "bad immigrant" archetype that those in favor of tougher border policies often point to: someone already a part of a criminal enterprise, who brought the violence of his home country to American soil.

Statistically, he's also the minority.

According to a report published this year by Washington, D.C., think tank the Cato Institute, immigrants in the country with and without authorization each have a much lower rate of incarceration than those born in America. In 2023, native-born Americans had an incarceration rate of 1,221 per 100,000, and unauthorized immigrants had less than half of this, with a rate of 613 per 100,000.

A big driver of this disparity is that the criminal justice system is especially hard on immigrants, which creates a deterrent effect, according to a co-author of the report, Alex Nowrasteh.

"Basically 100% of the time when illegal immigrants are released from prison after a conviction, they are turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for removal," Nowrasteh told Law360. "The punishment is so much greater because of that deportation."

But Nowrasteh said, at least in the past, there was some wiggle room.

"There's a lot of variation in this stuff," he said. "You're released by the government to ICE, you go to immigration court and they decide what to do with you. Sometimes they revoke your green card and deport you, and sometimes they don't."

This kind of leeway has all but vanished, though, under the Trump administration, sources said.

Gilmore, the San Antonio attorney, often represents immigrant clients in criminal and post-conviction proceedings. He said that it's been a "night and day difference" between this administration and the last.

Gilmore said he sees ICE placing holds on prisoners who have finished their sentence on "almost a daily basis now."

"Instead of being released to the parking lot, they're stuck in shackles until ICE comes and then immediately [they're] taken into ICE custody," he said. "They don't get a free day. They don't get the ability to go out and see their family."

Law360 asked ICE for how many people agents had arrested immediately upon release from prison, but the agency has yet to provide the data.

According to public information on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ICE's websites, the agencies are now deporting men and women who in previous years were spared deportation upon their release from prison.

In early February, for example, ICE deported to Jamaica a man named Nascimento Blair, who in 2020 had been released on parole from a New York state prison following a lengthy sentence stemming from a kidnapping conviction. In a news release a few months later, DHS referenced Blair's repatriation as an example of how Trump was righting the wrongs of his predecessor.

"Because of the previous administration's open border policies, this criminal illegal alien was released onto the streets of New York," the spokesperson said. "Thanks to President Trump and [DHS Secretary Kristi] Noem, this kidnapper is out of our country."

To Tolliver's mother, it all feels like "double punishment."

"He did his time," she said.

Fighting to Leave and to Stay

Tolliver says that when he went into prison at 24, he was mostly illiterate.

"All I knew is street knowledge. I was a wise kid who just knew how to survive from experience and living," he said. "When I got locked up, I said unless I want to die in here, I have to understand the law somehow, figure out what's going on."

Growing up in Jamaica, Tolliver said everyone was taught to recite the Bible's 23rd Psalm. His memory of the couplets helped him teach himself to read. He took the Bible and matched the words he'd memorized with the ones on the page. "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil …"

"I ended up falling in love with writing, and I noticed I have a gift with words," he said.

He used this skill in the law library, advocating for himself and other inmates. He has filed a number of civil actions against correctional officers and successfully fought off disciplinary charges against him, in one case winning $60,000 in damages and in another successfully annulling his disciplinary hearing and setting precedent in which his case, Tolliver v. Fischer, was cited in six other opinions following it.

"I want to help," Tolliver said. "I see how guys have been unjustly treated and I know what happened to me."

Tolliver's success in his legal efforts hasn't seeped into fighting his initial conviction, which he has appealed several times — including with an affidavit from his cousin, Gordon, saying that it was he and Talbert Simpson who killed Solomon, not Tolliver.

Tolliver's been denied every time without hearing.

"It was a battle that we just lost," said Justin Bonus, the lawyer who helped Tolliver on his 2023 state innocence petition. "There was a lot of evidence that he did not kill this guy. He had a very compelling case, and it's a shame that it had to go that way. It's BS."

But Tolliver kept fighting. He submitted an appeal pro se to the Second Circuit in 2024, which was denied. He says he sent in a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court this year challenging this ruling, but still hasn't received confirmation that it made it on the docket.

Tolliver also applied for clemency seven years ago. He says the state's clemency bureau continues to send him updates on his application, but no decision.

Although, even if he does receive clemency, it's not a sure bet that Tolliver would be eligible for asylum. Last year, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a precedential ruling that a vacated sentence could only be recognized for immigration purposes if it stemmed from some kind of procedural or substantial error in the defendant's criminal proceedings. This isn't out of the question, as a New York governor may use this form of executive power to correct injustices in legal proceedings, but it would likely have to be very explicit, according to immigration lawyer Alejandra Martinez.

If all else fails, Martinez said that one other potential pathway for Tolliver is to apply for a "deferral of removal" under the United Nations' Convention Against Torture, which prevents participating governments from sending someone to a country where they are more likely than not to face torture. But she said proving that someone is eligible for this deferral, which would allow the grantee to then apply for a work permit in the U.S., is an exceedingly difficult bar to clear.

Keeping the Faith


Black says if Tolliver is deported, it would "send her to the grave." But despite everything their family has seen and the limited options, she has hope.

"We are just praying that they will see the situation like how we see it, that the only hope he has is to be with the rest of his family here, that he could thrive and he will have a life," Black said. "He's all I have now, my only son … and I'm just praying to go before him."

Every time Sindy King visits her brother, "it's pure laughing."

"They have to lift me out of there when I have to walk away from him," she said. "He's been everything to me, my dad, my brother, my best friend."

But despite a bleak outlook for his life on the outside, Tolliver doesn't want to hide in prison forever. He says there's too much he wants to accomplish. His dream is to become a real litigator, trying cases in court. Last month, he enrolled in the paralegal certificate program at online university Blackstone Career Institute. It's a two-year program, but Tolliver said with all the time he has on his hands in prison, he's hoping to finish in four months, racing toward a future outside of prison he still believes in.

Tolliver said he's "not a fearful person," but his biggest fear is unfulfilled potential, dreams deferred.

"All my life, I have just been hiding and running and being something else," he said. "I want to make the world a better place before I leave it. I want to leave a mark in a sense, to say, 'This was Tony.' My real name. This is what he's about. This is him."

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo. Graphics by Jason Mallory. Header images courtesy of the King family/NewspaperArchive by Storied.

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