Following a violent altercation at a gas station in Montego Bay, Jamaican police and military forces detained Rastafarians throughout Jamaica, killing and torturing many.
The years prior to the Coral Gardens incident saw the building of tensions between the Rastafarian community and the British colonial government in Jamaica.
Following these events, the government began to arbitrarily arrest members of the Rastafari community, under the justification that Rastafarians were involved in orchestrating a communist revolution.
[1] In 1962, Jamaica was granted independence, but anti-Rastafarian sentiment continued to be prevalent in the government and police forces, which increasingly viewed the Rastafarians as a security threat.
This property was the site of both small-scale farming by Rastafarians, as well as the ambitions of landlords and government officials who hoped to convert the area into a tourist destination.
Franklyn received surgery in a hospital to repair his stomach, but was reportedly told by a doctor that once the plastic "rotted", his wounds would reopen and he would die.
According to police reports, a group of Rastafarians armed with spears, hatchets, and machetes set fire to a gas station as part of an attempted robbery.
[2][5] Meanwhile, the Rastafarian community in Jamaica held that the actions of Rudolph Franklyn and his compatriots were a justified reaction to decades of persecution by the government and perceived the mass arrests that followed as an abuse of state powers, a view that has been reflected by more recent academic scholarship.
[3] In 2015, Public Defender Arlene Harrison Henry submitted a report to the Parliament of Jamaica detailing an investigation of the Coral Gardens incident, and recommending that the government provide financial reparations for the injuries, abuses and deaths caused by its actions against the Rastafarian community.