The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (23 page)

“N
O, MAN—DON’T WORRY
about your tears. Don’t worry about the tears. Few tears makes you very human. We’re going to start with some very simple questions.” The camera was behind Ilan Ziv,
rolling, pointed at the prisoner on the other side of the glass. Stroman, with little else to occupy him, had prepared for this encounter for a long while. “Believe it or not, I had a good speech planned for you when I come out here,” he told the filmmaker. But his tears were betraying him.

“Just be yourself—that’s fine. So you really feel remorse,” Ziv said, his words more calming than his appearance. He looked like a well-aged version of the Israeli paratrooper he once was: bald-headed, thick-chested, with an intense, skeptical stare. He was naturally combative—the kind of man who begins many of his thoughts with “No, no, no,” even when he’s about to agree with you, just to make sure you hear what he’s about to say.

Ziv—the son of a Holocaust survivor, a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, now a documentary filmmaker consumed by questions about why people hate—had ambled into Stroman’s life almost by accident. He had been commissioned to make a film about grassroots peacemaking initiatives. As he did the research, he grew convinced that his subjects were “wonderful people with zero impact on society.” In his discouragement he cast around for alternative projects and became interested in the string of hate crimes committed after 9/11 around the United States. He encountered a woman in Chicago who was connected to the family of Vasudev Patel, which led him to write a letter to Mark Stroman sometime in 2004, asking if he might interview him. Stroman turned him down, saying that he was in the middle of his appeals and had been advised to stay away from the media.

They continued to correspond, though, and Ziv’s description of the project began to change Stroman’s mind. He wrote to Bob Templeton that he had had Ziv “figured all wrong.” The filmmaker had convinced Stroman that the project’s aim was to “show the complexities of the situation, to create an anatomy of the events and to humanize it.” It wasn’t long before Ziv received a second letter from Stroman. The appeal in question had failed. Stroman wanted to tell
his story. “He put a condition,” Ziv said. “The condition was, could I help him to buy a typewriter?”

One hundred or so dollars later, Ziv was sitting across from Stroman at Visitation. Though inches apart, they were separated by glass and were speaking to each other through black phones attached to metallic cables.

Stroman was a sea of red skin, green ink, and white cloth. He still wore the cross above his “187” tattoo. He sat opposite Ziv, bouncing with nerves. He explained that he had been waiting for a while and was “real hyperactive.” The guards had asked him to remove his crucifix for some reason, which unsettled him. After a minute, he decided he wanted it on and refastened it.

Stroman was full of concern at the beginning. “You look very different from your picture,” he said to Ziv. A friend had sent him a printout about Ziv from a website. He asked his visitor to repeat his name, to make sure it wasn’t some impostor. “I like your barber,” he said a moment later, bald man to bald man, to ease the tension.

Stroman began by confessing how suspicious he’d been of Ziv at first. He was expecting the usual portrait of him as a racist hater. “My wife’s Spanish. I’m not a racist. That wouldn’t make me a very good racist, now would it?” Stroman said.

Stroman wanted Ziv to know that he had lived well, that this present situation was the exception, not the rule. “I’ve got four awesome kids,” he said. “I’ve always worked my whole life.” His jail terms before this had been minimal: “My whole life, I was locked up six months at one stretch for an eight-year sentence and then three months. So nine months before 2001, September, have I been incarcerated. I’ve had a good life.”

Ziv asked about the chaos of Stroman’s childhood and how it had affected his life.

“No, I know what affected my life,” Stroman said. “It was September 11.” He asked if Ziv had been in New York on that day.

“Oh, absolutely,” Ziv said. “I saw it from the roof of my building.”

“Then you’ll never—then you know what I felt,” Stroman said, gesturing toward Ilan, hoping not to be left hanging.

“I know what I feel,” Ziv said. “You tell me what you feel.”

His voice cracking and preparing for a cry, Stroman explained how it had “trickled down all the way over here.” His eyes were wet. They searched Ziv’s face for any evidence of agreement, or at least understanding. Stroman said he still couldn’t forget those days: the hatred he felt toward the Arab world, the sight of people jumping from the towers, the stories of people trapped in Flight 93. “I’m very patriotic, and my country was attacked, so I kinda …” He snapped his fingers. “I took it personal.” He was sobbing now, and almost whispering.

Ziv tried to focus him. What actually made him leap up on September 15 and begin his attacks?

He blamed it on the looping reruns on television. “It’s just boiling up and boiling up, and I just snapped,” Stroman said. He acknowledged that, like so many other vigilantes, he had failed to target the people he thought he was going after. “I guess I’m that dumb Texan redneck where everybody from the Middle East is an Arab to me,” Stroman said, his face now brightening, a smile breaking open. “In my view, that was my stupidity. Even the man from India, I thought he was an Arab.”

He told Ziv that he’d never killed before, and that he’d felt almost possessed at the time of the shootings. He wasn’t in his own body, wasn’t in his own mind, he insisted.

Whenever Ziv tried to get more specific, to ask what Stroman was thinking during each shooting, he stared back blankly. He seemed vague on the details of his own deeds, and appeared unable to go beyond generalities and television-derived platitudes.

It was the shock of “the worse atrocity in American history,” he said. He recited again the tale, make-believe or imagined, of a half-sister who worked at Windows on the World: “Last thing I heard was that she still worked there. Well, I’m watching the bodies
jump. I’m watching people hold hands jumping off the buildings. I’m traumatized. I can’t get ahold of anybody and”—he shook his head for a moment—“I just snapped.”

That no such woman had actually died in the World Trade Center no longer much mattered.

Talking with Ziv, Stroman lurched back and forth between self-justification and shame. He said it still haunted him, everything he’d done. Even when he closed his eyes, he couldn’t escape. “My whole life, I’ve kind of been full of—I’m more on the wild side,” he said. “You can tell by looking at me. I’ve enjoyed life. But I’ve never killed anybody. And that’s something that’s hard to explain.” As he spoke, he was thumping the table in front of him every few seconds for emphasis.

Ziv asked how he explained it to himself.

Stroman said that he was only just now coming to terms with it. He was coming to terms with his own looming end as well. He had been on the Row a little more than two years—long enough to know he wasn’t getting out.

“My appeal?” he said. “I got about as much chance as a snowball in a hot skillet.” This line he hammed up for Ziv, putting on his best incredulous face. Ziv obliged with a gush of laughter and a table slap of his own. That laughter made Stroman smile.

He said he was trying to have a good outlook on things. He knew, without a doubt, that he would die by the state’s hand. Just today, his neighbor had gotten his date and broken down in sobs next door.

The deaths of neighbors were the bluntest kind of foreshadowing. “I seen a lot of people walk that final walk and not come back,” Stroman said. “I’ve seen people drugged outta here, being pepper-sprayed, gassed, kicking and fighting on their way to their execution.”

Ziv asked if Stroman believed in God.

“Oh, yes I do. This is kinda weird to say, but if I wouldn’t’ve come to Death Row, my eternity would’ve been lost,” Stroman said.

It was one kind of solace Stroman could take. In his understanding of Christianity, his long trail of sins could be washed away if he got his heart right with Jesus before the end. In fact, Stroman was persuaded that but for the commission of these murders, he would not be heaven-bound: that it required his utter bottoming-out, which prompted these years of isolation and undistracted one-on-one time with God, to earn salvation.

Ziv didn’t entirely follow this logic, and asked Stroman to explain.

“If I’da died out there on the streets, and my lack of faith—I’d have been screwed for real, for an eternity,” Stroman said. The crimes that he claimed to regret had bent his trajectory toward paradise.

I
n the America of the aughts, nothing said you belonged like buying a car you couldn’t afford. A year before quitting the Olive Garden in 2007, Rais treated himself to a Nissan. The burnt-orange 350Z, at close to $40,000, was a splurge, even to lease. But those curves that gave it the look of a high-tech, Japanese-made egg; those vast, road-devouring wheels; those prowling, vicious headlight-eyes … It had won the Most Sex Appeal Award from
Road and Travel
as well as the more buttoned-up Most Significant Vehicle of the Year honor from
Edmunds
. Rais was the farthest thing from flashy, wearing simple clothes and living in a modest home. But if he could manage the lease of $500 or so a month—and, with debt out of his life and his software career taking off, he thought he could—it might remind him each time he drove that he was safe, that all was well.

He drove his little rocket around for two years. He quit the Olive Garden in that period and began to work full-time in IT—as a database administrator for a local energy company called Crosstex. He
stayed a few months, then moved on to similar work at the University of Texas at Dallas, and then, the following year, found a gig at the Zale Corporation. To the outside world it was a diamond store. But it needed people like Rais because on the inside, like just about every other business in America, it had become a technology company, maintaining large and growing libraries of data that had to be constantly updated and instantly retrievable, so that when a dumped man in Phoenix returned a ring, the next minute an agent in Boston could tell a customer yes, that one is still available. Rais loved the work, loved the firefighting and problem-solving: a server outage here—hop on the conference-call bridge to fix it; a slowdown there—allocate some more memory. In material things, at least, all was well with the world, except for that car, which was a financial drag. “My eyes were bigger than my pocket that time,” Rais said. It had been a rare mistake for him, and a very American one. He was assimilating. After twenty-four months, he was free of the car, and relieved.

It took another year—until late 2009, with a new, declaredly antiwar president in office, and this era of conflict seemingly on the wane—for Rais to feel settled enough to fulfill a pledge. Now thirty-six, he had promised years earlier to take his mother to Mecca on the Hajj pilgrimage. Until now it had been close to impossible, given their distance apart, the expense, and Rais’s injuries and dedication to work. His mother knew that Rais couldn’t find the time to eat well or sleep enough or find a wife, let alone organize a pilgrimage to Mecca. For his part, Rais had been unwilling to go while in debt: among the faithful, there were divergent views on whether debtors could go on Hajj, and Rais, as was often the case, found himself on the conservative side of the argument. His view was that a person had to settle his liabilities before taking off for a faraway kingdom, lest piety become the refuge of deadbeats. Now debt was behind Rais, and he was financially sound.

Late in 2009, Rais flew to Dhaka. He stayed there a few days and caught up with the family. Then he and his mother boarded a plane,
bound for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was the first time for both of them. They were going a few weeks before the official Hajj dates, so the place wouldn’t be “fully loaded” with visitors, as Rais put it, borrowing the language of the American car dealerships he had come to know. Theirs was one of the special Hajj flights, and already packed with pilgrims, who began performing their ablutions and rituals on board.

Amma had flown before, but she was overcome with nerves. When the plane shuddered from what Rais called “a little turbulence,” she asked him why, with such a big sky, the pilot couldn’t find any other, nonshaky path. They were sitting near the wing, which Amma eyed warily to ensure everything was as it ought to be. As the plane swooped down toward Jeddah, a chunk of the wing began, ever so slowly, to detach from the rest of it. Amma became convinced that the wing was falling off. Rais tried to reassure her: it was just a flap coming down, and very much intended.

When they landed, a wave of feeling, which had been rising and gathering force over years, crashed over mother and son alike.

“It was the most beautiful thing in my life,” Rais said. “The feeling that finally I’m going with my mother, which was a promise to God—that I wanted to take care of her and to take her with me. So I was crying the day we landed in Mecca. We both, mom and son, were crying, because we never thought that it will come true one day.”