Alfred Ashford

First appearance: Resident Evil CODE Veronica

Information

Commander of the base on Rockfort Island. Although he's the son of the 6th-generation head of the Ashford family and chief executive officer of the Umbrella Corporation, Alexander Ashford, there's a dark secret behind his birth. In order to restore the Ashford family, Alexander began a secret cloning project (Codename: Veronica) to create genius clones of himself. The results of the project were the twins, Alfred and Alexia. But in contrast to Alexia, who was born a genius as predicted, Alfred was only marginally more intelligent than the average person and was thus dubbed a 'failure."

When the twins were 12 years old, Alfred learned that they had been created artificially, and he developed a strong distrust of his father. In this same year, Alexia used her hapless father as a test subject in her experiments, injecting him with T-Veronica. She then performed the experiment on herself and entered into a cryogenic sleep. In this way, circumstances led inevitably to Alfred's ascendancy in the company, as well as his ever-deeper descent into madness.

He graduated from a well-regarded British university in 1993 and was given control over the Antarctic and Rockfort Island bases. Although he was later to gain complete control over Umbrella, all he really did at the island was torture prisoners and adorn the base with his military collectibles. To Umbrella, Alfred was an encumbrance; nothing more than a petty dictator attempting to emulate a greatness that was far beyond him.

With no one to counsel him, his mental breakdown accelerated as he spent his days obsessing over the restoration of his family's power. Eventually, to assuage his loneliness, another personality began to emerge from within his tortured mind. That personality was an idealized version of Alexia that he had created from his own imagination.

Fifteen years after Alfred inherited the leadership of the Ashford family, Albert Wesker, well aware of Alfred's lack of ability, staged an attack on the Rockfort Island base in order to steal T-Veronica. The entire base was thrown into chaos after his troops scattered the T-Virus all over the island. While Alfred was searching for Alexia, Alfred chose to pursue Claire Redfield, who had escaped from the prison. He mistakenly believed that Claire was a spy who had infiltrated the base. For Wesker, this was an unexpected development, but highly welcome and even amusing. With a sniper rifle clutched in his single arm, he pursued Claire all the way to his birthplace, the Antarctic base. But ironically, the very day that his beloved sister awoke after a 15-year cryogenic sleep, he was shot by Steve Burnside, now allied with Claire, and plunged to his death into a deep glacial rift.