Stowaway's journey ends in a cell

A Ghanaian teen waits to learn his fate after being found hiding on a ship in Camden.

ELIZABETH, N.J. - The guards wouldn't let him bring a pen into the visiting room. They confiscated it.

That frazzled the teenager with the round face, wide eyes, and a demeanor so deferential he calls his lawyer "Meaghan Madam."

Lee Rockson, who gives his age as 16, said he had never been in trouble with the police in his West African port city. Yet, here he was - in a cubbyhole at the Elizabeth Detention Center, cradling a telephone in the crook of his neck, slowly and softly telling his tale from across a plexiglass barrier.

"I don't know what happened," he said. "I've been sent to jail."

What happened was, as Rockson described it, a desperate dash for a better life in America, a series of almost accidental opportunities snatched - and, then, an accidental discovery.

U.S. Customs agents had been watching the Aeolian Sky, a container ship docked in Camden with its cargo of lumber and cocoa beans, on Feb. 9. They suspected that a drug transfer would take place. But, in the end, heroin was not the only contraband seized.

The agents found Rockson - and 22 other stowaways - hiding in the ship.

Now Rockson wants to stay in the United States. His lawyer, Meaghan Tuohey-Kay, is arguing that he has no one to support him in Ghana and no way to make a living there. An immigration judge will decide his fate.

Until recently, his family had no idea where he was. For four weeks, Rockson had stretched out on an improvised bed of cardboard in a three-foot-high crawl space above his uncle's cabin.

His uncle, a seaman on the ship, had also let three other men take refuge in the space above his cabin. They boarded in Ivory Coast. One was a native of that civil war-torn country, and two were Ghanaians working there. Squashed side by side, they could not sit up. They spoke little. And when they did, it was in whispers. Fear of detection immobilized them.

"Maybe the captain will see," Rockson said during an interview last Sunday at the detention center, the first account of the voyage from any stowaway. "They come to check the cabins. They can come at any time."

So, they ate their meals - biscuits and sometimes rice with stewed meat, smuggled by his uncle - in the crawl space. And they urinated in one container.

Three times, they dared slip down to shower. Mostly, they just slept.

"The trip was hard," said Rockson, who was covered with rashes when armed immigration officers rousted him from the roof. "We meet weather. There was a big storm that blowed our ship."

The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Ghanaian Embassy are both investigating whether human traffickers arranged the stowaways' passage.

Ghana's coastline is a magnet for human smugglers, said Joel Frushone, Africa policy analyst for the nonprofit U.S. Committee for Refugees. "It's actually out of control," he said. "Because that coast is rather safe, it's a good jumping-off point for smuggling."

But most of the rings traffic in children tricked into working as prostitutes in the Middle East and Europe or as factory and plantation hands in Africa, he said.

Rings ferrying refugees from Ghana, an oasis of relative stability in West Africa, are not common, he said. In the last decade, only about 2,000 Ghanaians have entered the United States seeking asylum, according to immigration data.

Rockson insists that he did not pay for his journey to America. He also said he did not know so many stowaways were aboard the ship until, hands and feet shackled, they marched single-file into vans bound for the detention center.

In fact, his version of his flight from poverty in Ghana suggests that it hinged on the haphazard. Or, as Rockson believes, a divine act. "Things opened to me just like that," he said. "God was doing things."

The ship had docked in Takoradi, a port city surrounded by fishing villages along Ghana's west coast, shortly before noon.

That afternoon in early January, Rockson left his mother, Elizabeth Egshun, in the kitchen cooking. He did not say goodbye. He had told no one, not even her, what he was about to attempt. And he expected nothing but a rebuff once he got to the vessel, he said.

For two months, ever since police officers cleared away the market where his mother sold plantains, he had been pleading with able seaman Matthew Egshun, his uncle, to help him escape.

His father, a farmer, died more than a decade ago.

And now, with his mother out of work and Rockson almost a grown man, he couldn't stand to stay any longer in the bungalow belonging to his extended family. Its 10 rooms hold more than two dozen people, only three of them regular breadwinners.

Rockson had no job - and no prospects for one. If his soccer club won a match, he'd get his share of the prize. And sometimes he snagged day jobs at construction sites. But it seemed that he never had any money.

So, clad in jeans and a cap with "Miami" stitched on it, and carrying the equivalent of $1 in cedis, the Ghanaian currency, he managed to talk his way past the man standing sentinel in front of the black-and-orange behemoth.

Once aboard, he had to persuade his uncle.

According to Rockson, Matthew Egshun asked him whether he had faith enough for the voyage. Most stowaways head for Europe - only nine days away. His ship, he told Rockson, was going to America. A friend in Philadelphia could take Rockson in. But the journey would be harrowing, and his own strength would not suffice.

"I didn't know that he would say yes," Rockson recalled. "But I was having the confidence that God would pave a way for me."

Today, thousands of miles from home, Rockson is still praying for God to pave a way for him.

Rockson is now "number F-15" - an anonymous detainee wearing a tan jumpsuit, like all the rest, one of 300 adult men held after entering or living in the country without proper documents.

They include 19 of the other stowaways. One, a 16-year-old, was sent to a juvenile detention facility in Atlanta. An immigration spokesman said the rest have been deported. None is from Ghana.

Immigration officials dispute Rockson's age. Their dentists contend that, because his third molar has erupted, he must be at least 18. But his claim to stay in the United States - a category for children who are victims of abuse, neglect or abandonment - rests on his being a minor.