She said that Payne and his grandmother were always on the run. "They were going from one village to another," she said. "When the rebels got there, they'd have to leave again."
Kromah tried to find Jeff and another son, but she couldn't. "They were running from to place to place. His father was trying so hard to find him. I thought he was not alive. I thought he had been taken by rebels."
At some point, during a raid, Jeff was apparently shot. His half brothers, Michael Gillies, 19, and Wilmot Daye, 25, both remembered him saying that he had been shot and showing them the scar.
More than 200,000 Liberians died in the civil war, which lasted from 1989 to 1996, according to the U.S. State Department. Millions more became refuges.
But in 1995, Jeff was found. "They found him up in a forest," she said. When the war ended, he and his half-brother Wilmot Daye came to America. Payne was 11 at the time.
The two boys were dazed at first. "We both got here with no educational background," Daye said. "We didn't go to school there. I think the hardest thing for him was leaving home and coming to a new place."
Payne attended public schools in Howard County and was living and working in Laurel. He got in some trouble with police, pleading guilty to a disorderly conduct charge in 2005. Daye said that his younger brother liked flashy clothes and name brands.
"He liked living the celebrity-like life," Daye said. "He felt like, `I come from a poor background, I'm not going to live like I am poor.'"
Kromah said she didn't have a high opinion of her son's recent friends and wanted him to live with her in Virginia Beach, Va. "I wanted him to get away from friends that he was with. Every mother wants a good life for her kids. I think he needed to get away, just be away."
annie.linskey@baltsun.com
