Kingston, Jamaica, September 11th, 1987. A warm Caribbean night. A man who had spent his entire life fighting against oppression, singing about equal rights, and standing up to governments, police forces, and entire systems of power was shot twice in the head inside his own home.
Not on a battlefield, not at a protest, in his living room while watching television with the people he loved. His name was Peter Tosh, and the story of how he died is one of the most heartbreaking and complicated stories Jamaica has ever produced. To understand who killed Peter Tosh and why, you have to start at the beginning because Peter Tosh was not a simple man.
He was a man who made powerful enemies, carried deep loyalties, and lived by a code that the world around him constantly tried to break. Winston Hubert McIntosh, the man the world would come to know as Peter Tosh, was born on October 19th, 1944 in Grange Hill, Westmoreland, the westernmost parish of Jamaica. He was named Winston after then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a quiet irony for a man who would spend his life raging against colonial power.
His parents, James McIntosh and Alvera Coke, were too young and too unprepared to raise him, and so Peter was left in the care of his aunt in Grange Hill. From the very beginning, he knew what it felt like to be abandoned, to be on the outside looking in. That feeling never left him. It fed his music.
It fueled his rage. It shaped every word he ever sang. When Peter was around 15 years old, his aunt died, and once again, he found himself with nowhere solid to land. He moved to Trench Town in Kingston, one of the most notoriously poor communities in the entire Caribbean. Trench Town, so called because it was built over the trenches that drained the sewage from Kingston’s wealthier neighborhoods, was a place that swallowed people whole.
But, Peter Tosh was not the kind of man to get swallowed. He arrived with almost nothing, started selling sugarcane juice from a cart to survive, and found his way to music. He had already begun teaching himself guitar before he left the countryside, an ability that came to him almost supernaturally. The story goes that he once watched a man play a single song for nearly half a day, memorizing every finger movement, every chord change, and then walked up to the man and played the song back perfectly.
Just like that, the man was stunned and asked who had taught him. Peter said he taught himself. In the early 1960s, Peter started attending free music lessons given by a Trench Town vocal teacher named Joe Higgs. It was there, on the dirt packed streets and the concrete blocks of Kingston’s most hardscrabble neighborhoods, that Peter McIntosh met two other young men who would change the world.
Their names were Robert Nesta Marley and Neville O’Riley Livingston, better known to history as Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer. The three of them bonded over music, over Rastafari, over a shared hunger to be heard. They began harmonizing on street corners, rehearsing in yards, dreaming of something bigger. By 1962, they were singing together officially, and by 1964, they had formed the Wailin’ Wailers, the group that would eventually become one of the most iconic bands in the history of popular music.
Peter was the backbone of that group. He was the most musically accomplished of the three. He was the only one who could play instruments when they started, and he taught the others. He played guitar, keyboards, and sang with a deep, authoritative baritone that cut through everything around it. He co-wrote some of the most enduring songs in the reggae canon, including Get Up, Stand Up and 400 Years.
But as the years went on and the Wailers began to find international success, the spotlight slowly shifted more and more toward Bob Marley. By the early 1970s, the tension within the group was becoming impossible to ignore. Peter’s voice, his politics, his unapologetic militancy was seen by some as too sharp, too confrontational, too difficult to package for a mainstream audience.
In 1973, after the release of the album Burnin’, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer both left the Wailers. Peter walked away from the group that had helped define him and stepped forward on his own terms. His solo debut, Legalize It, came in 1976, and it was exactly what you would expect from a man like Peter Tosh.
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It was a direct, full-throated call for the legalization of marijuana, tied to his deep Rastafarian faith and his belief that the criminalization of cannabis was part of a broader system of oppression against black people. The album was banned from radio in Jamaica. It cracked the Billboard 200 in the United States.
It sold over a million copies. Peter did not care what anyone thought. He was going to say what he had to say. In 1977, he followed it with equal rights, an album that many music historians still regard as one of the greatest protest records ever made. The title track declared something that became a permanent part of Peter’s identity.
I don’t want no peace. I need equal rights and justice. He was not interested in symbolic gestures or handshakes for the cameras. He wanted actual change. He wanted the structures of power that kept black people poor and oppressed to be torn down completely. His lyrics attacked apartheid in South Africa, colonial exploitation, police brutality, and political corruption at home in Jamaica. He was not a man who whispered.
He was a man who shouted. And the more people tried to quiet him, the louder he got. By 1978, Peter Tosh had signed a deal with the Rolling Stones own record label, Rolling Stones Records, and released Bush Doctor, an album that featured Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and brought his music to an even wider global audience.
He was becoming a superstar by every measure. But that same year, something happened that tells you everything you need to know about the kind of man Peter was and the kind of enemies he was making along the way. On April 22nd, 1978, Peter Tosh took the stage at the One Love Peace Concert, a massive event held at the National Stadium in Kingston before an audience of over 35,000 people and more than 200 foreign journalists.
Both Prime Minister Michael Manley and Opposition Leader Edward Seaga were seated directly in front of the stage. Bob Marley would later grab the headlines that night by joining the hands of the two political rivals in a famous moment of symbolic unity. But, it was Peter Tosh who people who were actually there still talk about with a kind of reverence and disbelief.
He lit a marijuana spliff on stage, blew the smoke in the direction of the politicians, and then spent nearly a full hour delivering one of the most ferocious political speeches ever given from a concert stage. He accused both political parties of backing police brutality. He accused the system of deliberately keeping the poor in poverty.
He said, in front of the commissioner of police himself, that every police station should be closed. He was not performing. He was delivering a verdict on the people sitting right in front of him. The newspapers the next morning were furious. They called it an embarrassment. They said he had disrespected the nation and attacked the authorities.
Peter Tosh did not apologize for a single word, and the consequences came quickly. Just 5 months after the One Love Peace Concert, in September of 1978, Peter was arrested at Halfway Tree Square in Kingston for smoking marijuana. What happened inside that police station is something that haunts the record of the Jamaican authorities to this day.
Peter Tosh reported being beaten so severely that he came out of police custody with a broken hand, head injuries that required stitches, a broken rib, a fractured arm, and a punctured spleen. According to his then manager, Herbie Miller, the total physical damage required 32 stitches in his head alone. They wanted to break him. They did not break him.
Peter continued making music through the early 1980s. His 1983 album Mama Africa reached number 59 on the Billboard 200 and is still considered one of the finest records of his career. In 1987, just weeks before his death, he released No Nuclear War, an album that won him a Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album. The man who had been abandoned as a child, who had sold sugarcane on the streets of Trench Town, who had been beaten by police and had his music banned, had just won a Grammy. He was 42 years old.
And then on the night of September 11th, 1987, everything ended. Here is what we know happened that night. Peter had flown back to Jamaica from a business trip to the United States earlier that day. He was relaxing at his home on Barbican Road in the Saint Andrew area of Kingston.
With him that evening were his common-law wife, Andrea Marlene Brown, renowned Rastafarian broadcaster and disc jockey Geoffrey I Dixon, along with his wife Joy, herbalist Wilton Doc Brown, drummer Carlton Santa Davis, musician Michael Robinson, and a few other friends. They were sitting in the living room watching a satellite television program.
Just after 7:30 that evening, the front door was thrown open and three men stormed inside. One of them was Dennis Leppo Lobban. Everyone in that room knew who Leppo was. He was a man from Peter’s own community, someone Peter had known for years, someone Peter had tried to help. Lobban was wielding a gun. His two companions, whose identities have never been made public to this day, were also armed.
Lobban immediately ordered everyone to get on the floor, face down, using the Jamaican phrase “feel it”. He then turned to Peter specifically and told him directly, “You’re going to be dead tonight, so you better say nothing.” He demanded US dollars. Peter told him he did not have any cash in the house. Lobban did not believe him.
What followed was not a quick robbery. It was hours of terror. As the night went on, other associates of Peter arrived at the house to visit, not knowing what they were walking into. One by one, they were taken hostage, too. Lobban grew angrier and more erratic as time passed. According to Marlene Brown’s testimony, Lobban turned on her at one point, accusing Peter directly of letting her have too much authority over him, and claiming that she was the reason Peter had not been taking care of his people.
He threatened to behead Peter if the money was not produced. At one desperate moment, Peter, clearly shaken, reportedly stammered that he could make arrangements for the money at another time. For a brief moment, it seemed like that might be enough. It was not. When the demands were still not met, the three gunmen opened fire on everyone in the room.
They shot all seven people in the head. Peter Tosh was shot twice in the head and died from his wounds. Wilton Doc Brown was killed. Jeffrey Dixon was killed. Marlene Brown was shot in the head, but survived by lying still and pretending to be dead while one of the gunmen prepared to finish her off. Lobban, apparently believing she was already gone, ordered the others to leave her.
Carlton Santa Davis, Michael Robinson, and Joy Dixon also survived their injuries. The The men ran from the house, jumped into a waiting taxi, and disappeared into the Kingston night. The taxi driver, a Saint Andrew man named Steve Russell, was later taken in for questioning and revealed that he had driven Laban and his two companions to Barbican Road that evening.
He had picked them up near the Carib Theatre at Crossroads, and he told police that as the three men came running back to his car with guns in hand, Laban screamed at him to drive. That testimony, combined with the eyewitness accounts of two survivors who identified Laban directly, became the spine of the prosecution’s case.
Dennis Lepo Laban was apprehended and brought to trial. He maintained his innocence throughout the entire process, telling the court he had been drinking with friends at a grocery shop on Three Crook Street in Jonestown all night and heard about Peter’s death the same way everyone else did. He said he did not leave the shop until 10:00 that night.
The jury of eight women and four men did not believe him. They convicted him on all three counts of murder in what became one of the shortest jury deliberations in Jamaican legal history, clocking in at just 11 minutes. Justice Carl Patterson sentenced Dennis Laban to death by hanging on June 11th, 1990.
The Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal, ruling that a powerful case had been made out against him. In 1995, Laban’s death sentence was commuted and he has remained in jail ever since, housed at what was then called the General Penitentiary and is now known as the Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre in Kingston.
Another suspect was acquitted due to insufficient evidence. The two other gunmen who entered Peter Tosh’s home that night were never publicly identified and have never been brought to justice. Their names to this day remain unknown to the public. Now, the official record says that what happened on Barbican Road on September 11th, 1987 was a robbery gone wrong.
A desperate man with a gun who felt owed something and could not control himself. And there is a story behind that version that has been circulating in Jamaica since the night of the murder itself. The street talk, the community rumor, the thing that everyone seemed to know before the trial even started was that Loban had once gone to prison in Peter Tosh’s place.
The story goes that Peter was caught with contraband, allegedly in a motor vehicle, and that Loban stepped in, took the charge, and went to prison so that Peter’s career would be protected. Loban made Peter promise that he would look after his family while he served his time. Peter Tosh, by the time Loban walked out of prison in October 1986, was a Grammy-nominated superstar who had toured the world, signed with the Rolling Stones label, and shared a stage with Mick Jagger.
And allegedly, Loban’s family was living in poverty. When Loban himself was interviewed years later by the media, he admitted something quietly devastating. He said, “I took a rap for my brethren, protecting his career, and nothing has been done for me.” He said he could not see why that would be used as a reason to convict him.
But he did not deny that the arrangement had existed. Make of that what you will. The court never made it a central part of the prosecution’s case because no concrete evidence of it was ever produced at trial. But the people of Kingston believed it then and many of them believe it still. Then there is the other theory, the one that does not involve personal betrayal or street level grievance at all.
The one that points at something much larger and much darker. Peter Tosh in the years before his death had become one of the most politically dangerous voices in the Caribbean. He had stood on a stage in front of the Prime Minister of Jamaica and told him to his face that the system he ran was built to destroy black people.
He had been beaten by police so severely that his body would carry those injuries for the rest of his life. He was a vocal opponent of apartheid in South Africa at a time when many world leaders were still refusing to take clear positions on the issue. His music and his speeches were being distributed around the world. He was not just a reggae artist anymore.
He was a symbol of resistance to everything that the establishment both in Jamaica and internationally represented. Some people who were close to Peter in his final years have always believed that the robbery was a cover, that Loban and his two unidentified companions were not acting alone or on their own motivation, and that the decision to kill Peter Tosh had been made somewhere much higher up the food chain.
There is no hard evidence for this theory, but the fact that the two other gunmen were never found, never named, and never charged despite one of them being seen by multiple survivors has always felt like a door that was never fully opened. What is not disputed, what cannot be disputed is that on September 11th, 1987, Jamaica and the world lost something irreplaceable.
Peter Tosh was 42 years old. He had just won a Grammy. He had spent decades taking punches from a system designed to silence men exactly like him, and he had never once gone quiet. The boy who was abandoned in Westmoreland, who sold sugarcane in Trench Town, who taught his bandmates how to play guitar on street corners, who was beaten in a police cell and came out swinging harder, was gone.
Dennis Lowe Bon would live out the rest of his days behind the walls of a Kingston prison, still maintaining to anyone who would listen that he was not there that night. The two men who were with him walked free and were never spoken of again in any official proceeding. And Peter Tosh’s music, the music that once made politicians squirm in their seats and police officers reach for their clubs, kept playing long after the man himself was silenced.
That might be the most amazing story ever told. In October 2012, more than 25 years after his death, the Jamaican government posthumously awarded Peter Tosh the Order of Merit, the country’s fourth highest honor. His legacy lives on through the Peter Tosh Museum in Kingston and through the Peter Tosh Foundation, which continues the work he started.
Every October 19th, his birthday is celebrated at his family monument in Belmont, Westmoreland, with live reggae music in the same parish where a little boy with no parents and no plan somehow became one of the most consequential voices of the 20th century.
