The father of shooting victim Colford Ferguson found out on the internet that his son had been murdered more than 20 years after he last spoke to him. Colford Ferguson Sr had not been in contact with his eldest boy since 1989, a fact he told The Royal Gazette he now bitterly regrets.The estrangement meant Mr Ferguson Jr, 29, died on February 4 this year without knowing he had a younger half-sister and brother just a couple of hours away by plane, in New York.Mr Ferguson Sr said he’d tried without success to trace Mr Ferguson Jr in recent years but never imagined he’d lose the chance to reunite with his son, who was just eight when they were last in touch and whose mother died not long after.“I feel emotional and mental and physical regret,” he said. “And, most of all, disappointment with myself because I should have persisted more often than I did. It’s the last thing I expected to happen.”The 52-year-old, of Mount Vernon, New York, is determined not to make the same mistake with his granddaughter Ny’Ashia Ferguson-Wilson, the murder victim’s only child.He will meet her for the first time when the four-year-old travels to the US with her mother Nkosazana Wilson next month. “We talk on the phone a lot,” he said, adding that he’d love to forge a close relationship with her. “That’s why I invited her to my home. She’s coming November 1.”Ms Wilson told this newspaper that Mr Ferguson Jr believed his father was in Jamaica and spoke about trying to trace him just weeks before he was killed. “He said when Ny’Ashia was older he wanted to take her to Jamaica to see her poppa. It’s crazy. I think Colford would have been ecstatic to find out that he had a younger brother and a young sister.”Mr Ferguson Sr was born in Jamaica but moved to Bermuda with his parents, where he met his son’s mother, the late Melodine Ferguson (née Smith). He worked as a landscape gardener and in construction but said he lost his work permit and left the Island for the States in late 1986, when his son was five.“I was keeping in contact with his mom and then his mom passed away,” he said. “I used to keep up with him. I had a friend of mine, she used to follow up with me and let me know how he was doing. I lost contact with her and I didn’t have any way of getting in contact with Colford. He was living with his grandmother. I didn’t have no contact with Colford’s grandmother.”Mr Ferguson Sr said in recent years he’d tried “quite a few times” to reach his son and tell him about his siblings, Denise, 21, and 19-year-old Omar. “I kept on trying and trying and trying,” he said. “The years go by.”A friend alerted him to the murder in July. “Right now, I have never been the same and I never will be. I feel like every drip of bones and flesh and blood had left my body because I hadn’t seen him and I’m trying to reach him. I just spoke of him a couple of days before and then this is what I discovered. It’s like my heart filled up my chest. He was buried and I didn’t know anything about it.”The news was confirmed by Bermuda Police Service, which put Mr Ferguson Sr in touch with one of his son’s half-sisters on the Island.She sent him a DVD of the funeral, which he plays repeatedly. “It gave me a little bit of comfort [but] I can’t get over myself,” he said.“I’ve been feeling in many years I haven’t talked to him enough. Right now, I’m hurting because of that. I wasn’t in his life.”The divorcee, who lives alone, cherishes the memories he has of his son as a “very friendly and outgoing” little boy, including a family trip to Jamaica to see Mr Ferguson Sr’s eldest daughter Kim, now 31.“When he was a little baby, he was my best friend and he and I went everywhere together. We’d go fishing, we’d do a lot of things together until I left.”He said his son’s killer still being at large made him feel “very upset” and if he came to the Island he’d want to find him. “They should be caught and they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Even if Colford was involved in something with them, you don’t do that. “Life is something given from birth, life is something you cherish. They took that away from Colford’s daughter. They took that away from me. They took that from everyone who loved Colford in Bermuda.”