Recovering drug addict Steven Somner has first-hand experience of what it’s like to be barred from the US because of a criminal conviction.

The 46-year-old’s voice fills with emotion when he talks about the time, 12 years ago, that he tried to take his epileptic baby son to the States for vital medical treatment.

“My son had been taken ill and I had to go abroad with him to Boston,” he tells The Royal Gazette. “I was turned down at the airport. I had a meeting...at the airport. I was very honest about what I had been involved with. I said: ‘right now I have caused a problem for him’. He was about 11-months-old. I said: ‘he needs medical help and because of me I have hindered that’.”

Thankfully, Mr. Somner was granted an exemption on that occasion and was allowed to board his flight - but for the next ten years he could not enter America again due to his criminal past.

The father-of-three is now determined to help young people avoid making the same mistakes as him and finding themselves on the stop list for America.

He is backing the US Consulate’s campaign to keep all Bermudians - but especially young ones - from ever finding themselves banned from travel to the States. And the only way to do that is to stay conviction-free. “I’m really grateful for being accepted into America on that occasion with my son,” says Mr. Somner, who has a string of convictions for dishonesty and burglary but is now rehabilitated.

“After that my mother was living in Florida and I couldn’t go out there to see her when everyone else was. I was hurt. But who could I blame but myself? My kids were able to go. I was giving them tickets when I was able to but they were hurt too knowing that their daddy couldn’t travel.”

Mr. Somner is now a ready mix driver in the construction industry and says he has totally turned his life around. Help came via the drug treatment court and a policeman who arrested him for the final time - a man he now thanks when he sees him in the street.

He said: “I have six certificates of rehabilitation at home. I pin them on my wall like diplomas, like bachelor degrees. Just like somebody who has graduated from university, that’s how I feel. The rehabilitation meant a lot to me but today it’s my actions and what I do today by making the right choices, better choices, stopping and thinking. At one time in my life that was something I couldn’t do. I had to be taught to live again.

“If you surrender to it openly, the doors are there, they are open. You have to give it time. It takes a lot of encouragement. A lot of folks are behind you.”

He puts his years of crime down to a difficult childhood. “It started with dishonesty with me in my childhood,” he says. “Making the wrong choices is what I did by not talking about it. As I got older and got more involved I found that to suppress the feelings that I was going through I had moved on to using drugs. When I made a bad choice I carried that dishonesty with me for years.”

His son is now 13 and, along with his two siblings, knows better than most children the consequences of crime and drug addiction. Mr. Somner, who lives at Spanish Point, says he took his children along to probation meetings so they could see what he had done and act as a reminder to him if he ever forgot why he wanted to change.

His mission now is to make other young people taking drugs realise “there’s consequences coming along with the substances”.

“I want to just target those young people so that they understand they can still have fun without committing crime,” he says. “Make those good choices because you all have dreams. Imagine right now that you get involved in criminal activity. All those dreams and goals wash away.”

He says people who react with anger when they realise they are on the stop list - often when, like him, they are actually at the airport trying to catch a flight to the US - need to understand it’s their own fault.

“I understand today that that’s a process I brought upon myself. I can’t take the attitude and get mad with the officers that’s just doing their job.”

He also advises those who are on the list to do what he did - and try to get off it by contacting the US Consulate.

“My thing is it’s so beautiful for me,” he says. “For ten years I wasn’t able to travel. My family were going abroad and I had to accept that was the way it was.

“I had to follow the process. Many times folks were telling me I was wasting my time. But at the time my life was on an up rise and it still is. That wasn’t going to stop me. That’s what it’s about today - just seeing a different picture. I was locked into this country. Eventually I realised that you can unlock this. You can free yourself. You just have to do what’s required.”