PASSINGS

Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste

Priest fought for Haitian immigrants

The Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste, 62, an influential Haitian Roman Catholic priest who fought for his countrymen’s rights in the U.S., died Wednesday in a Miami-area hospital of complications from a stroke and a lung problem.

Jean-Juste, who was born in Cavaillon, Haiti, came to the U.S. as a young man and founded the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami in the late 1970s.

When the U.S. government began to systematically deport Haitian immigrants, he fought to ensure that they received due process for asylum consideration, immigration attorney Ira Kurzban said, adding that it was in part Jean-Juste’s activism that enabled Haitian asylum seekers to obtain work permits for the first time.

Jean-Juste returned to Haiti in the early 1990s and was a prominent supporter of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

After Aristide left the country during a bloody coup in 2004, the U.S.-backed interim government jailed Jean-Juste in connection with the killing of a prominent Haitian journalist and poet.

International human rights groups maintained that the charges were politically motivated, and eventually they were dropped.

Christopher F. Randolph

Head of Marine scholarship fund

Christopher F. Randolph, 64, a Vietnam War veteran and former president and chief executive of the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation, died of brain cancer May 22 near his home in Old Westbury, N.Y., said Margaret David, the foundation’s current president and chief executive.

Started in 1962, the foundation provides scholarships to children of Marines. During his four-year tenure, which ended in December, Randolph raised funds totaling $38.5 million for college scholarships.

Randolph was born in New York City and earned a political science degree at the University of North Carolina.

Commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, he commanded a mortar battery in Vietnam and, later, Okinawa, Japan.

He served in the Marine Corps Reserve until 1973.

After leaving the service, he worked for Republican U.S. Sen. Jacob K. Javits of New York.

He then pursued a career on Wall Street in the 1980s and 1990s at Salomon Bros. and Lehman Bros., where he was managing director.

-- times staff and wire reports

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