World

Man slain as bomber worked, saved

GONZAGA, Brazil - Jean Charles de Menezes couldn't get ahead at home so he went to Britain to eke out a living as an electrician, hoping he could return to this rugged, farming community with enough savings to become a cattle rancher. The 27-year-old mistaken for a terrorist and shot dead last week by police on a London subway recently told family members he would have enough cash in a few years so he would never have to leave Brazil again. But this Sunday, his father, Matzinhos, cried in the family's small concrete home with red roof tiles at the end of a rutted dirt road. He was holding a recent photo of his bare-chested son smiling while lifting weights. During the trip home last year, Menezes told family members and friends he was doing well, making good money and friends, and driving a relatively new pickup truck. His father, a bricklayer and lifelong Gonzaga resident, was concerned London could be dangerous, but Menezes told him not to worry. "They don't have violence," he recalled his son saying. "It's good there; nobody walks around with a gun." Menezes was killed Friday at the Stockwell subway station as police investigated the series of botched transit bombings a day earlier and the attacks of July 7 that killed 56 people, including four bombers. Witnesses said Menezes was wearing a heavy, padded coat when plainclothes police chased him into a subway car, pinned him to the ground and shot him in the head and torso. London Police Commissioner Ian Blair initially said Menezes was "directly linked" to the bombings investigations, but police said Saturday he had no connection to the attacks. The shooting is being investigated. Menezes, called "Jim" by his English friends, was believed to have been on his way to repair an alarm in the Wilsden Green neighborhood when he was shot, according to his cousin, Alex Pereira, who lives in London. Menezes carried his electrical tools in a knapsack and often took the subway to work at different sites around the city. Menezes' mother, Maria, said her son's fascination with electricity began when he was small, perhaps because it did not reach their home amid groves of banana and orange trees about 12 miles from the town center. When Menezes was 10, he built a radio from scratch and decided he wanted to become an electrician, she said. "He was just so happy to see that it worked," she sobbed, as relatives consoled her.