good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. You're listening to the coffee table. This is e Ruth, and this episode we're talking about the intimidation. What. Took place after we found out our father died.
And how there was a immediate response to that from , our stepfamily and how that's affected us, how it's affected me. So of course, as we go through the process of finding out what was going on, asking all these questions, having all these red flags go up about , the suspicion around our father's death, what the police had told us in terms of what.
Our stepmother and our stepsister said, who had my dad's phone who had access to viewing all his messages, all his inbound calls, which we learned was my stepmother at that police visit. And it's so funny because at the time it didn't even matter to me that they were gonna know that I was the one who asked those questions because they went back to the phone.
I can see. In the WhatsApp page, if you have WhatsApp, you can go to anybody's message and you can see the last time that someone looked at the message. In fact, I just looked at my phone and on June the sixth at 6:00 AM in the morning, someone had definitely went back to listen, look at my dad's messages.
Now, what I realized in retrospect is that anytime that happens, that means that there's a conversation going on, and I'll talk about why I'm saying that. A little bit later. So I hear about our father dying. And the first thing I wanna do is I want people to hear his voice.
Not just bad boys, not just sweat, but the other music that he had, like from his album, hot Cup of Coffee. There's just a lot of great music that our dad made that a lot of people in the US I think didn't get a chance to really experience. As a reggae legend, a part of his legacy to us at least, is that his voice continues to be shared and experienced.
So what happened was I had an Instagram page that was called the Looking Glass it, basically talked a lot about Just social justice stuff. The topics mostly was about like white supremacy, just his on a historical level and presently, and how it still affects us at all levels.
Nobody's being singled out. It's really, it was really about the character of that ideology. Now it's funny that now that I'm talking about the situation with my family, it puts, it brings everything together in terms of just the human character that I spent a lot of time talking about.
And you'll see some of those posts that if you check out the looking glass page that I still got to keep on Facebook. But due to this type of intimidation that was happening with me just simply sharing. I just went, I created three videos three of those videos. At the end of the video. It had a picture of my dad, him performing with his microphone.
It was just two pictures that I posted first of my dad his birthdate and his death date. Above that it said Grammy Award winner singer songwriter of the song, bad Boys Sweat. Has died and it has his birth date and has death date.
And then on one reel it had the Bad Boy song playing in the background. And on the second reel it had the sweat song because I knew that was the most popular songs that he had in rotation that people would immediately like, oh, I didn't know that man's name was Carlton Coffee. But I do know the song.
So the goal was for me to make sure people knew that he had died So people could honor him. And that we were honoring him, whether I was told or not. Whether we were told or not, we were going, we were gonna do this. And if you follow David on Instagram or on Facebook, he's constantly, always, and even when we were little, he was always the one that was like, that's my dad.
Nice. Okay, let me go sit down over here. Like I never, I was just good with being in the background quiet. So it would have not been, it would not have been a strange thing to see David posting anything about my dad. Or sharing things about our dad as it, it shouldn't have been that strange for people to see that for me, actually people probably, it probably was more strange for me because I didn't really share that was our dad ever.
It, I don't know what circumstances it took for me to say that, but it usually would come out like why am I hiding this? Okay, yeah. This is my dad. Maybe you'll find out one day. And so maybe as of recently before he died, I started sharing that a little bit more. But it's not something that I've done regularly Anyway, I go, I create these posts because I know I have the page.
I know people are looking, following things like that, and I'm like, let me share this with folks that are following me so that they know too, that this is his voice, this is his legacy. I post to those videos. David shares them as well, and then all of a sudden I go to log into my Instagram page and I see.
Copyright infringement by my f our father's estate. Then it had, it names the estate specifically his full name, the estate. So I'm like how and keep in mind I admittedly, I did pull the records from the, I did record the song from YouTube and then I post it in the background of the video.
Then after I remember I did that, Instagram sent me a message saying, oh this song has now been added into the Carlton coffee. Like songs for reels. There's a catalog that each artist has in Instagram or Facebook I don't know where else. YouTube I think too. So I'm like, wow, this is really cool.
Like we got some of his songs in Instagram. I was really excited. I was like, this is great. It's gonna get in rotation hopefully with people hashtagging it, things like that. And all of a sudden I get that copyright infringement thing. So I deny it. Cause I'm like, this is my dad. I'm not copyright infringing anything.
Like I, I was, there for when a lot of these songs, when they were being recorded, I don't see a problem with it. We all were there. And so I go and I see that and I deny, I dispute it, and then lo and behold, Instagram comes back and they're like, no. And they ended up taking the whole page away.
Maybe a day or two or later or so, I go back and I create a new page. Is titled the official official the looking glass. Then I start posting this time, but instead of me posting my dad's images, I just post with music, hit some kind of just animated video, type of short video, and then I.
At the end, I put in his name and his birthdate and his death date. So that page stays there for some time. And then after that I realized that I see that someone, my uncle had posted a YouTube video then I notice that there is a woman, a DJ in Columbia that is playing, doing a tribute to him on April 22nd. But by the time it's, it goes in the circulation, it's a little bit later than that. Actually, it's before we even go to the police. So the news started to spread slowly that had passed away.
And I'm watching this woman and she's, and she's emotional. She's talking about how dad will call her, which it goes to his character, right? The narrative. When we get to the narrative episode, if you've not already gotten a chance to look at the. Justice for Carlton Facebook page. In the narrative, the stepfamily is talking about that our father only reached out to the people that he loved, that he wanted closest to him.
And so as I'm looking back at this woman who's a disc jockey, she is talking about the conversations that she had with dad. She's talking about how they talked last year, how he always used to uplift her. He gave her this African. This continent at Africa medallion years ago. So she had a, he had a relationship.
He was very good at networking with people and keeping his relationships together. And so I'm just, I wanna share this, I want everybody to know Hey, this is ladies already doing a tribute. This is so nice. And I talk about us trying to get together to have some kind of memorial for him. I put it in a, this WhatsApp, we have this separate WhatsApp group.
Which is for his spiritual community, our spiritual community. And I say, Hey, I'm gonna give you all update on when we're gonna have the memorial. And I left it at that, I don't know, 10 minutes later, 15 minutes. I don't even have, no, it was very fast. I go back to my Instagram page to go look at, to see exactly how the video is going, rotation for the new videos that I had to redo without his image on them.
And they're using the real music from the music, from the reel, the Instagram reels. And I see I can't log into my account again, and I'm like, what is this? Why can I log it? And I see again copyright infringement. Then I go to my Facebook page. The looking glass. And I also see, again, copyright infringement.
The, I didn't even get a chance. I was just trying to fi figure out like why was this coming up on Instagram? So I had missed the opportunity to go in and see why they were saying that or dig a little bit further and Instagram just wiped that account again. I go back to Facebook. So I just basically agreed to, yeah, I'm copyright, I'm doing copyright infringement.
I agreed to that's what I'm doing. I will not do it again. And that's how I was able to keep my Facebook the Looking Glass page. And I got really upset. I'm like angry as I don't know what, because none of these siblings who said that they loved our father, who he loved us. So in order for you to love him, you have to have you.
You should be able to love us too. None of these siblings, step siblings. Have reached out to us, even to this point. There was an attempt, but that attempt I took is gonna be very aggressive and I just ref just avoided having that kind of confrontation because I was so upset. And so far when I did talk to only one step sibling, the one that told me that dad had died.
She never once said, I'm sorry for your loss. I'm sorry for your, I expressed my condolences to you. In fact, I sent her message saying, I'm so sorry, for the lo for your loss. I even asked is your mom okay? And she's yeah, she's okay. To this day, I've never gotten any kind of message anywhere, but when I did get was intimidation or an attempt to intimidate me.
So then that was. I again, sometime I believe before May, on May the first, I get a call from the oldest stepsister, the one that he lived with, the one that she said to the police that he only wanted her and her mother, which is on our stepmother, present at his funeral services because he did not like the fact that no one reached out to him over this period of time while he was sick.
Now, mind you, They have his phone. No one's contacted his brother, his sister, anyone, to let him know that he was in the hospital in ICU, to even be able to say prayers to come down to see him, to show some kind of support from his, the family that he grew up with before he even knew me or my brothers or any of them.
None of that happened. So instead of getting that kind of grace, what we get is this type of intimidation and. I'm furious I'm not gonna lie, I was in the Walmart and I'm like, if I see any of these people right now, I don't know. I don't know, Lord, how you keep me together. I was, look, I was so mad at, and when you're in the situation, you are going back and forth between, is this real or is it not real?
Is it real or no, it is real. I really, this really happened to me. They really treated me this way. They're not only treated me this way, they really treated my father this way. And now they're trying to intimidate me by calling me and sending me this very aggressive text message. Oh, I'm trying to call you.
You can put Kevin on the you can put Kevin on the speaker, speaker on speaker. And I'm like, I'm, I don't know who you're talking to. I'm not gonna do this with you. And I just blocked her. Then she found her way in this our spiritual WhatsApp group and is out of nowhere, still no condolences at this point.
We've already shared the tribute that was done. There was responses like, oh my goodness, may he rest in peace. Things like that from all kinds of people that were in, everybody that was in the group. None of them. They're they're at least my stepmother was in that group. My stepsister, the one that she lived with my father lived with the second oldest stepsister, was in that group, the third oldest stepsister.
And the youngest stepsister was in that group. Oh, and also the step niece was in that group, the one that was like, wow, news spreads quickly. I didn't know that he passed away. Why didn't anybody tell me until today? The whole acting thing that all of them are in that group with me. My husband's in group as well.
And so out of nowhere she's heaven and Ruth, I'm trying to reach you. I'm trying to reach you. Call me back. No, I'm not calling anything and I just was not gonna do it. Cuz I, as I said early on, when I found out, or I was told by my step, my youngest, the youngest of the step siblings that I should reach out to my, her oldest sister, which is my step oldest stepsister and her mother.
I told her I'm uncomfortable with that. I'm not going to do that. I will figure it out and I'll find out on my own. So to get a message like that out of a group, that has completely created, it's like it's none of this. She even have carried on in that group. That there, her attempt to intimidate was so strong that she went into us, like the spiritual group, to even call us out, to even reach out to us.
I'm trying to call you. I've been trying to reach you all. Please call me back. So I block her there. I block them on Instagram. I block 'em on Facebook. At this point, I'm like, you're watching me so hard. Just like they watched me in my life with my relationship with my dad, and was always critical or always had something to say about my relationship.
My dad, meanwhile they have, they, meanwhile they have fathers. They're all alive. But they spend a lot of time paying attention to the relationship between me and my father, but not in the times when it matters. Like when he is in ICU or when he is dead. That's the time when you would pay that much more attention to me.
They didn't do any of that. So I'm just fear. I'm furious. I'm sitting here, I'm going through my days where one day I'm okay and the next day I realize why I don't have a dad, like my dad's dead. And it's funny because the Monday before I found out, In the previous episode, David talked about like just a coldness, like I didn't have a coldness, but I did have I was just really sad for the last couple months, like March, I was extremely depressed.
I was already not sleeping well. Anyway, that's been going on for the last two years since I've been on this different, this like late night shift. But I was just really restless and. Just depressed. And I remember crying and just like crying out to God. I don't have a dad. I don't have a dad.
Like I don't have a dad. I have a mom. But my mom, she's, she's has her own struggles. And I just felt parentless, like I don't have, I don't have anyone. And in that sense of a parent, and I didn't even know my dad had passed away at that time, but I remember feeling very uncomfortable, uneasy, like something was wrong, feeling restless starting from.
Really, from the time that I realized I wasn't getting much response from him, which was back on January the 11th, that was the last time I talked to him. So understanding that was like my emotional state. And then to have someone try to intimidate me, get rid of the work that I built over the last two years with my Instagram page, I'm very passionate about the subject that I was covering and I had to start all over again.
So that really upset me cuz it, it was already one thing that I lost my father. It's another thing that I was kept out and isolated from him while he was in the hospital. It's another thing that my children was isolated and kept from him in the hospital. It's another thing that my son received a text message on February the eighth after he had already died, as if everything was fine.
I received a message on March March 3rd, as if he was fine, and I will leave this whole time that he was alive. So all these horrible things have happened. No condolences, no nothing. Then all of a sudden you're trying to take away what I've built for myself, which is unrelated to you. I simply just posted that my dad had died and when he died at his birthday, but that's all of a sudden when we start getting, the narrative of about, oh, he didn't want anybody to know, because after they did all that to me and my pages, they started reaching out to.
My, our cousins, my cousin, my uncle, and the it the strangest thing that they're asking. Again, no condolences, no. Sorry for your loss. No, nothing. The first question that comes out of my oldest stepsister's mouth, the one who lived with him when he died in the house that he died in was, did you post something about Carlton on Facebook?
Of course, everybody's natural reaction is, who the hell are? Excuse me, who the hell are you? Because as I said earlier, my dad keeps in contact with everybody when he's not touring, when he's not recording or while he's recording, he calls people and he talks to people. Me and my dad would spend hours, six hours on the phone, sometimes four hours on the phone.
Sometimes, yes, we could talk forever. I get it from him. To have that be the first question that comes from his stepdaughter who isolated everybody, who kept everybody out from his the right to be at his funeral to celebrate, honor and grieve for him, to mourn for him so he could know that he, all those people that he talked to, actually those were the people who showed up.
As they would, as they should, as they wanted to. That in that situation, the first thing you're gonna do is ask them, did they post something about the man that they loved, who was a, who is and was a reggae legend, who is a Grammy Award winner, who's no one could find online any information that he even had passed away that you're questioning his brother, his cousin, they're.
Audacity to even talk about the fact that they learned a man who they loved died. And then to go take it a step further saying things like basically that, I think my aunt, I remember talking to my uncle and he said, it was funny how they end the conver how she ended the conversation, which was you let me know if you need anything.
And it was and way he took it as was, are you trying to buy me? Are you trying to like, Black. Not blackmailing, but are you trying to intimidate me in a way of using money to make me be quiet about posting about his death? That is strange behavior. And this type of intimidation tactic continued.
They ended up reaching out to my father's longtime friend that he known for 42 years. He was in the military with him and. Basically called him not the oldest stepdaughter, but the middle stepdaughter. She contacted him and was basically trying to tell him about her mother. She had been married to my dad for 36 years or something like that, and he was like I've known him for 42 years, so what are you telling me?
I remember when my dad was telling me that he was sick. Not that my father was sick, but he was telling me that his friend of 42 years had gotten sick. And I was like, wow, that's, crazy. He's yeah, I'm just gonna pray. I've been praying for him and, hoping he gets better.
So when he told me, yeah, I talked to your father and my father was keeping me up in good spirits because I was really sick and I finally got, I had just gotten diagnosed from a condition that I didn't know that I had all these years. And so just to hear that he didn't get a chance to give that back to his friend, that he spent 15 months in serving the military and and of course being around for pretty much all of us as when we were younger children.
We saw his children, we grew up with his children as well, to not be able to give that same type of attention or grace to our father to be there for him when he was sick. That's the type of evil and cruelty that they did to call him and then try to tell him that he basically, he should be posting things on Facebook.
And that's essentially what happened. He had posted some things about that. Oh, he's my friend. I miss him. I wish I would've known, what happened. I wish I would've been able to be there. I wish I would've been able to honor him. He is a reggae legend. He was my friend. This is what they were calling him.
To basically intimidate him from posting because apparently the way that they were saying things was like, my mother's going through a lot why is she on Facebook? What, why is she on Facebook when people who didn't know about dad dying, when he died are learning about it now and it's only natural?
Why? Where are your, where's your natural human emotion to recognize that when someone tells you. That somebody that you love dies, the first thing that you're gonna do, especially if there's someone who has some kind of music material. We see it all the time. There's celebrities that have passed away some, in their prime and some who, over time we know their names, they pass away and they mention it.
It's just a normal thing to do. Why would you be surprised that someone's sharing about their friend who they just learned who didn't go to their service died? So this was another intimidation tactic and then, Probably three or four days later, like of course he continued to post cuz he's honoring his friend.
The oldest stepdaughter calls him again and he said that he had to block them. And I said that's exactly what I had to do because when you're grieving and you're grieving without actually being there for the service, it's almost like you're still getting up some days and you can't believe that. I'm getting up some days.
I'm just gonna say that outright. I'm getting up some waking up some days and I'm like, is this really real? Did he really I know I went to the grave. I felt cold grass. I felt the cold stone. I saw his name on the stone, but it's still not connecting to me sometimes that he's actually in the ground and that he's actually died because we didn't get a chance to do it the right way.
So that intimidation tactic carried on and then they start, then they posted a narrative and the narrative is going on about his integrity and all these different things. And then of all the things that he's ever said that ends on his favorite quote was, blood is thicker than water, but loyal. But something, blood is something family, blood is, family is blood.
But loyalty is, I don't even know. It's just the whole statement doesn't make any sense to even say that Beneath saying that this is a man of integrity, that this is a man of good character and that he loved people and he loved his music and all these different things, but he somehow left out his fans.
He had wishes he knew who was gonna die, but he left his fans out. He left his brothers out, his sisters out, his nieces, his nephews, his cousins, his children out. And so all these contradictions tied to the intimidation tactic that they were using, which is why we've come to this conclusion that something is terribly wrong.
Only someone who truly has something to hide would be intimidating people. An example, I'm watching this show called a Friend of a Family and. This is an extreme example, but it gives you the point. The father a friend of the family, he starts to seduce the mother or he just gets really friendly with the mother and the father and, but he's actually really trying to get to their daughter.
And one of the things that he does is he takes advantage of the parents. And then he tries to gaslight them, intimidate them blackmail them so that he can guilt them into allowing them to do whatever he wants to do with their child. And to me, when I saw this, it just like alarms went off and I'm like, wait a minute.
This is this is a kind of exactly what they do. Yes, they don't have any emotional connection. A sociopath, like if you look up this type of term sociopath, and I'm not just throwing that out just to throw it out. I literally had to research to try to understand how does anyone make such a decision while also claiming how kind they are and how nice they are and how much they've done for me and all these other things.
But when it comes down to human decency, morality expressing or showing a good character, Your approach is to intimidate, is to lie, is to gaslight, is to manipulate in order to get what you want, which is for us to be quiet. They didn't want us posting about dad's death aid anywhere. They didn't want us playing his music, which also triggered me too whoa, is he, is his voice haunting you?
This is strange. How is it that I'm, I wasn't even in there. David wasn't there too far, wasn't there? We, none of us. His brothers, no one, none of us were there to actually be at his funeral services. But y'all are acting like vampires who can't take the side of a garlic every time you hear or see us post something about him on social media.
Cause that's just the era that we live in. That's what people do. So these are these are why these flags are up for us. This is why we're so dogmatic about. Moving forward and getting the public to know what happened so we can get someone to listen, look and get the police to get back into investigating what happened.
If you're, if it's any of you all that are in my, our shoes, you would be asking the same question. You would want an autopsy. You'd want to know why is this person intimidating? All these people who have not been able to mourn him and. Do whatever you can to try to get to that place. Now, I don't know what it looks like for many other families who have found themselves in this position.
There's been a lot of cases I've seen over the last couple of years where the family did have to go to social media. I think somebody had posted this on our, on the, our Facebook page, justice for Carlton about, oh, don't, don't put this on Facebook, or something along the lines like, we're here.
We're here to be transparent. We're here to be open. We're here to tell the truth for what it is. We want the truth. And right now, this is the only way for us to be able to get that. And we want to show people too that someone may try to intimidate you. Someone may try to shut you up, but when you're doing the right thing, it doesn't matter what the, what their out, what their hope for an outcome is.
What matters is that what you're trying to do, which is to get justice, that you're able to continue to be encouraged to do that because you get to see people like us who are figuring it out as we go along though, but are doing it nonetheless because we're going to get to what we're trying to get to, which is justice no matter what.
So thank you for taking a listen and I hope you keep thinking about this, and I hope that you keep connecting to what we're feeling and take action. Go to GoFundMe, go to our Facebook page for a call to coffee and continue. Keep listening to the podcast, the coffee table.
