life Shyne was born Jamal Michael Barrow, in Belize City in Belize in Central America, to Frances Imeon Myvette and Dean Barrow, who were not married. Shyne's mother is the sister of Michael Myvett, now going by the surname Finnegan, one of Dean Barrow's long-time political colleagues in Belize. Barrow's middle name comes from his uncle. Shyne's Jewish maternal grandmother had emigrated from Ethiopia to Belize. As a child, Barrow's time was divided between his mother in Brooklyn, New York City, and his lawyer/politician father, who initially failed to acknowledge his son, and was years later elected in 2008 as the first black Prime Minister of Belize. Barrow's mother moved to the United States when he was three years old, leaving her son with his father who was busy with politics, and left Shyne between the care of his mother's brother Michael and father's sister Denise in Belize City. His father was in a relationship with another woman, and Barrow recalls: “The nigga said his two other kids were made out of love. It was devastating. That shit really fucked me up.” When he was seven years old, Barrow moved to Brooklyn to live with his mother in Crown Heights and then East Flatbush, in near poverty, while spending summers in Belize with his father. His mother supported them by cleaning homes and taking care of children, and he slept on the sofa in their small apartment on Church Avenue and East 18th Street. After he moved to Brooklyn, he began to develop a strong interest in the hip-hop culture of the 1980s and 1990s. At age 15, while in a fight he was shot in his right shoulder by another kid in Flatbush, Brooklyn, leaving him with a six-inch scar. After graduating high school three years later, part of the time of which he spent attending high school in Belize at Wesley College in 1993, he enrolled in a New York City College of Technology computer program. He paid for his tuition by working as a bike messenger, buying an 18-speed bicycle and riding it from Brooklyn over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, where he made deliveries around the borough. He left NYC College of Technology to pursue a career in music. Early music career 1997–99: Career beginnings, and signing to Bad Boy In 1998, while Barrow was freestyling in a barbershop on Church Avenue in Brooklyn, he was