Is This High School Athlete Faking His Identity, An Illegal Immigrant, Or Both?
“Los Suns” might be what’s really capturing the nation’s (and J.D. Hayworth’s!) attention, but the latest and craziest intersection of sports and illegal immigration is happening two states over. Meet Jerry Joseph is a 16-year-old budding high school basketball star in Odessa, Texas. Or maybe not. Some say he’s concealing his true identity as Guerdwich Montimere, a 22-year-old former high school basketball star in Florida.
As outlandish as it all sounds, Montimere’s old coaches in Florida, after encountering Joseph at a recent tournament, contend it’s exactly what’s happening. One of those coaches, Louis Vives, said:
“He played in and around our organization for three, four years. He’s grown up with us and you know these kids. You just know them. His demeanor, the way he walks, the way he was talking, everything is the same.”
Cedric Smith, who also coached Montimere in Florida, offered a succinct take on whether Joseph and Montimere are one and the same:
“I’m 100 percent sure. I would bet my paycheck.”
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel produced the before-and-after photo at left (Joseph is on the left, Montimere on the right). But before you can even look and try to decide for yourself whether Montimere’s old coaches have a point, ESPN’s story on the saga counters with:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have determined that Joseph is not Montimere, but that Joseph, from Haiti, is in the country illegally.
ICE spokeswoman Leticia Zamarripa told USA Today that investigators used the FBI database and determined through fingerprint analysis that Joseph wasn’t Montimere.
An actual investigation would seem to trump anecdotal accounts from former coaches, although Joseph doesn’t come out much better if it turns out he’s in the United States illegally.
At this point you may think that this story couldn’t get more bizarre. Amazingly, that’s incorrect. More from ESPN:
The Odessa American reported that Joseph was enrolled at Permian by Jabari Caldwell, who was a teammate of Montimere’s at Dillard. According to the newspaper, Caldwell signed an affidavit that Joseph was his half-brother.
However, Wright’s wife, Jamie, told the Odessa American that Joseph phoned her last week and said he wasn’t related to Caldwell.
Caldwell told the Odessa American that he helped Joseph enroll at Permian as a favor to a friend he used to play with in Fort Lauderdale. Joseph, whose Haitian birth certificate says he was born on Jan. 1, 1994, was homeless in Fort Myers, Fla., after fleeing a hurricane in Haiti in 2008, the newspaper reported.
“He asked me if it was possible for me to help him enroll in school,” Caldwell told the Odessa American. “I met him in Odessa. He came out here on a Greyhound.”
We’re not sure what to think at this point, except to say that this story is really, really out there. The details are so strange, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine this becoming a national talking point in the way “Los Suns” was – after all, if no one really knows what’s going on, it’s a tough story to rally a cause around. What this story does provide, on the other hand, is great drama. And considering Joseph’s current high school, Odessa Permian, gave us Friday Night Lights, we’d expect nothing less.
