Tacoma, Wash. ? They were unlikely companions.

From one corner of America to another, John Allen Muhammad has lived his 41 years by his own rules.

In the Army in Louisiana, where he was a B-student sharpshooter and went by Sgt. John Williams, he was twice court-martialed in the 1980s for disobeying orders and punching out a fellow sergeant.

As John Allen Muhammad, a converted Black Muslim, he violated a court order in Washington state in the ’90s, terrorizing his wife, kidnapping his three young children and holing up on the floor of a Christian chapel in a homeless mission.

And in recent weeks, police now suspect, he lived out of his car with a 17-year-old Jamaican he variously called his son or stepson, picking off victims at random with a Bushmaster high-velocity rifle.

The youngster there is no record of any family relationship to Muhammad had lived most of his 17 years by the rules of others.

He was born Lee Boyd Malvo to a teenage mother and a 39-year-old mason in the heart of an urban war zone the Jubilee Hospital in downtown Kingston, Jamaica.

He grew up amid the brutal drug wars, record murder rates and wrenching poverty that endures on the Caribbean Island nation, but not without Jamaican family values an abiding and polite respect that greeted any elder with a “yes, ma’am” or a “yes, sir.”

Three years ago, Malvo and his mother, Una James, left it all behind for a better future. Illegally, they landed on the Florida shores, smuggled in on a cargo ship. They migrated to Washington state.

Instead of a future, they found John Allen Muhammad.

In time, Muhammad would take the boy with him to that homeless mission in Bellingham, a town near the Canadian border that one resident describes as “a Mecca for people who want to be as far away as possible from wherever they are from.”

Malvo would enroll in the local high school, where he proved an insatiable learner who knew more about U.S. history than his teacher, classmates recalled. But it wouldn’t last; immigration authorities caught up with him, yanked him from school and detained him for three months until last February.

It was after his release, and after a cross-country odyssey that apparently included stays in Baton Rouge, La., and Montgomery, Ala., that Malvo and Muhammad found themselves Thursday in a beat-up Chevy Caprice, surrounded by police in the early-morning darkness near Frederick, Md., suspected of being the random snipers who have terrorized Washington, D.C., and environs since Oct. 2.

That is the picture that emerges from hundreds of pages of court records, and interviews with dozens of state, U.S. and Jamaican government officials and friends and relatives of both men.

Williams was born and raised in Baton Rouge, where a cousin, Edward Holiday, 38, grew up with him. He said Williams’ mother died when he was young and he was raised by two aunts, both teachers, and his grandfather. He has two brothers and two sisters.