Out of the Box - The Story of Leroy Smith: outoftheboxbook.uk

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He was on the run when the officers – PC Seymour and his colleague PC Simon Carroll – were shot on March 9, 1994. Smith himself did not convert immediately he was asked to because he says he’s not the type to “jump on a bandwagon when it comes to God.” Instead he took his time and eventually, in 2007, came to the conclusion that Islam was for him.

Leroy fired another shot which hit me about a centimetre away from my spine, ripped across the top of my kidney and ripped out the side of me,” he said. He decided writing a book could be a start, to tell his story in full and hopefully offer a lesson to young people caught in similar circumstances. The sense of helplessness, I can't tell you what that feeling is like. Physical pain, you can get over or you get through, [but] the mental side [is something else].Mr Smith, whose mum was murdered when he was two years old, said: “This place, when I think about it, is just making me feel nauseous. I want to pass out. This is an emotional place. I’m kind of lost for words and that’s not like me.

That awareness could well have saved his life several years later when he and a colleague spotted suspicious activity around a hire-car vehicle. I've used a gun. It's cold like ice and that runs through you. 'It's a far better life in Birmingham than London' Leroy, meanwhile, learnt the hard way himself after serving 20 years of a 25-year sentence for shooting two police officers in Brixton. Read More Related Articles They enjoyed a Number One hit with Sad Sweet Dreamer in 1974, and Top Twenty hit Purely By Coincidence a few months later. Being shot might have altered James’s sense of danger, but it didn’t mean he was suddenly going to seek out Leroy and become his friend.He added: “I just decided rather than have all the bitterness and anger against him, why not make something positive out of it. From the mere fact that a Muslim prisoner did not need drugs or drink to function inside the prison system and only needed food and exercise in the gym, it was clear from the start that brothers could adapt to anything. Slowly but surely inmates started to convert, some for inner peace, others for their own ends, or to seek personal power.” I felt degraded [and] upset at the time. For many years there was a lot of bitterness there. Not hatred, but bitterness,” he said.