The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  Amber, who had just turned sixteen and looked almost like a female facsimile of her father, had been trying to call him for a few weeks but hadn’t been able to get through. Because he’d always gusted in and out of their lives, she never thought much of it. She had no interest in the TV that day and was heading to the porch to eat her pizza in peace. But as she crossed the living room, Channel 4 went into the breaking story. A Dallas-area male had walked into three convenience stores and opened fire on three Middle Easterners. They put up a picture of her father, followed by a video of him, wearing a cutoff shirt and jeans, walking into a store, shooting the clerk, peering into the camera for a lingering moment—right at Amber, it seemed—and walking away.

  Amber stood there staring at the screen. Erica and Robert, her younger siblings, started to cry. Robert ran out of the house and down the road, sobbing. He was a giant of a boy, thick like his father, a school football player whom rival teams made plans about. He bolted down to the train tracks, to some abandoned old cars. He took shelter inside one and wept.

  Tena Stroman—the children’s mother and Mark’s first wife—heard the news while traveling. Her sister, the aunt with whom the children were staying, called her when they saw it on TV. Tena wasn’t regularly in touch with Mark, but she still thought of him as the great love of her life, and the news knocked her over: “My sister called me and told me that Mark Stroman has killed somebody. About that time, the phone started cutting out real bad. I heard my kids in the background crying, and I started, ‘Where are my kids? Where are my kids?’ I couldn’t tell if she said Mark Stroman killed somebody or Mark Stroman got killed. I just went to ask where my kids were because I heard them crying, and she said that Erica was in the living room crying, pulling her hair; my son, Robert, took off down the road, on the railroad tracks, crying, and wouldn’t let nobody mess with him or talk to him.”

  To Tena, it just didn’t sound right. Mark was hardly a stranger to trouble, but she knew he’d never kill anyone. He was the kind of man who might slam an ashtray into a guy’s forehead if he got fresh with his woman, as he had once. He might toss a man into the wall after a few too many at the Texas Trap. But not this. She called around to the local jails she knew and gave Mark’s birth date—October 13, 1969—because she was sure it was some other Mark Stroman who had gotten himself into this mess.

  No, ma’am, they told her. That’s the guy. Same name, same DOB. There appears to be only one Mark Stroman.

  IT BEGAN WITH running what he gathered to be Arabs off the road. As Stroman cruised Dallas in the days after his country was attacked, his victims would have seen a white 1972 Chevy Suburban pulling up beside them, with a rolled-up American flag in the windshield, maps of Texas on the plastic cases of his side mirrors, and resentful stickers on the rear window. “If I had known this,” one said, “I would have picked my own cotton.”

  Like other vigilantes in the feverish days after 9/11, Stroman was not entirely sure what an Arab looked like. But he felt “anger and the hate towards an unknown force,” as he later put it, and he knew enough to direct it at people with “shawls on their face.” He was stuffed full of images of the attacks from watching TV, and entranced by a mood of vengeance in the country that was making even the limpest liberals perk up to his way of seeing things. “Everybody was saying, ‘Let’s get ’em. Let’s get the dirty bastards. Let’s bomb ’em,’ ” Mark said. “Who? We didn’t know, but as Americans we was wanting justice.” He claimed to have company in his dark pursuit: “I wasn’t the only one in Dallas doing that. There was a lot of us out there hunting Arabs.”

  What began as harassment on the roads—presumably, pushing cars into emergency lanes and ditches, though Stroman wasn’t specific—soon escalated. Stroman was seething over what those men had done to his country. He became certain that he had a sister working at Windows of the World, in the trade center’s North Tower, and that she had been killed. Time would show this conviction to be without basis, though in general Stroman was lucid and in control of his mind, not given to such fantasies. He somehow convinced himself, nonetheless, that his government would prove too timid, weak, and sympathetic to the enemy to avenge his sister’s death and the deaths of all the American innocents. Not long afterward, still fueled by the language of rage all around him, he explained his motivation thus, in words that would become an exhibit in his trial:

  I began to feel a great sense of rage, hatred, lost, bitterness and utter degradation. Although revenge wasn’t my motive, I did want to exact a measure of equaility. I wanted those Arab’s to feel the same sense of insecurity about their immediate surroundings. I wanted them to feel the same sense of vulnerability and uncertainty on American soil much like the mindset of chaos and bedlam that they was already accustomed to in there home country. How dare they come to America and be at peace and find comfort in country, our country, my country America, and here we are under siege at home, because we are the land of freedom.

  My sense of anger surged when I reflected upon the past that I’m a tax paying citizen whose hard earned dollar has been sent to those countries as a means of humanitarian aid. There homeland was a place our country feed when they were starving, medicated when sick, clothed when naked or cold, educated when in error and gave willing assistance and defended when they was under attack.

  I looked at the fact that over 5,000 innocent Americans lost their lives because some foriegner felt a need to make a statement at the expense of innocent people. Well I felt as Americans we needed to exact some sort of retribution and also make a statement here at home and abroad. That if we as American’s was going to be under siege here at home then certainly they would have need to feel our pain. My sense of security and my right to live in peace and sanctity was all but shattered.

  As I began to reflect upon what I could do, would do or better yet should do in the wake of the World Trade Center atrocity, I looked at the situation and took an assessment. I then found myself going to the store to make a purchase, and there perched behind the counter, here in the land of the free, home of the brave, the land of the pilgrims pride, land for which my forefathers died, the bell of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness had all been silenced by those people.

  He was there perched behind the counter, here in the land of milk and honey living the freedom of liberty of the thousand’s of victims of Sept 11, and here he is in this country at our expense was this foriegner who’s own people had now sought to bring the exact same chaos and bewilderment upon our people and society as they lived in themselves at home and abroad.

  It left me with this sense of just having had someone spit in my face. After all our country has done to help build, educate, and liberate their country and to see that those people thought so little of America and consequently the American way of life with such contemp and utter disregard.

  In closing this was not a crime of hate but an act of passion and patriotism, a act of country and commitment, an act of retribution and recompense. This was not done during peace time but at war time. I, Mark Anthony Stroman, felt a need to exact some measure of equality and fairness for the thousands of victims of September 11 2001, for the United States of America and it’s people, the people of this great country.

  At half past noon on October 5, the day after the Patel killing, Dallas police made their way to Cayuga Drive, looking for Stroman, on the strength of Tom Boston’s identification. Shortly after two, the cops saw a Thunderbird pull up. Stroman got out and seemed to remove something from his trunk. Fearing a news-helicopter-worthy standoff if they let him go inside what might have been an armed fortress, officers in raid jackets emerged and swarmed their man. Stroman tried to flee to the back of the house, removing a chrome Smith and Wesson from his waistband as he ran and dropping it to the ground. But the hiding was over. Stroman was arrested and read his Miranda rights. In the ensuing questioning, officers reported him laughing and crying at the same time.

  The police soon came upon evidence suggesting that shootin
g three immigrant clerks was perhaps just the beginning of a much grander—and never consummated—plan. Mark Stroman, who thought of himself as an “allied combatant” going up against “enemy combatants,” as he’d heard them called on the news, may have been contemplating a gruesome attack on a Dallas-area mosque—a kind of 9/11 counterstrike.

  In Stroman’s car the police found a loaded semiautomatic rifle with at least 150 matching cartridges; an Uzi knockoff with 29 cartridges; a .44 Magnum; a .45 Colt; a Top Line bulletproof vest; a pill bottle with a little cocaine; bottles of Effexor, an antidepressant, and Carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant; 2.5 grams of marijuana and rolling paper; and a hat that said, “Show me your tits.” Long afterward, Stroman addressed what he called the “rumor” of his planned attack on worshippers at the Richardson mosque. It had crossed his mind, he confessed. He would become the patriotic American inverse of “Mohammed Atta and all them fanatics” from 9/11. After all, what a statement they had made. “In my mind, if I’d walked in that mosque and leveled about a hundred or so people, that would’ve made a statement, too,” Stroman said.

  Outpatient

  “Where am I?” he remembers asking. Rais figured the voices belonged to the angels at the gates. He had always wondered about the Afterward. The voices sounded warbled and far away, as in the movies. They were beautiful voices—perfect women’s voices. They seemed to be above him now. Were the angels holding his hand? Yes, he sensed that they were. Was this heaven or earth?

  “Am I still alive?” He gargled the question through what tasted like a doubly salted ocean in his mouth. He resolved to try to open his eyes. He pulled at them hard. No movement, only feverish pain.

  “Yes, you are still alive,” the nurse said in that perfect voice. “Good morning!”

  He was still down here.

  Night had fallen and lifted. It was morning now, the first full day living with fresh realities. Memories of the incident started trickling back. Joyful tears poured over his bulging face. His jaw seemed under someone else’s control; he had barely managed the few words he had uttered and sensed that more would be difficult. He couldn’t swallow.

  After a time, he understood that his two eyes were no longer on the same schedule. The right refused to bargain. The left hinted at being slightly more reasonable. Once again he pulled. And this time the left opened, glazed with its own saltwater. It was definitely not heaven, just a floodlit, sterile room, and he was on an adjustable bed, a woman gently clutching his hand.

  It wasn’t long before he asked to see himself. The nurse handed him a mirror.

  “I looked at myself with my left eye open,” Rais said. He saw stitches. Heavily seasoning the puffed right hemisphere were little blood-hued dots. These were where three dozen or so burning-hot pellets—designed to escape the cartridge and form a metallic spray to bring down erratic birds—had entered: they flew into his mouth and broke a tooth, flew into his cheek, his nose, his ear, his forehead. “That face was swelling like this big, and this area”—around the eye—“was a big bruise, like somebody punched you a hundred times,” Rais said. “All those dots, all those gunshots. And I said, ‘Wow, I look terrible.’ Though I was happy that time that I was alive, once I see my face, I was in a shock. Will I live with my face like this for the rest of my life?”

  It didn’t take him long to wonder, “What will Abida think?”

  The nurses informed him that, despite contrary appearances, he had been mightily fortunate. The pellets had flirted with entering his brain and, at the last second, held back. They were millimeters away when they stopped.

  As Rais tells it, though he was sickened by his condition, even in this moment, another part of him—the part that always kept him in check—tried to spare him from a descent into self-pity: “I was thinking that, well, why should I complain? I got my life, so let’s not worry about that right now.” He remembers feeling a strange, immense gratitude. “I could feel the happiness—that how beautiful, how precious is just to live,” he said. “How life is so precious. I got my life back, and I’m still alive.” He could speak to his family again. See his mother, his father, Abida. That was the greatest blessing. If he felt other, darker things, he refused to confess them.

  “That is the moment I think about every single day,” Rais said much later. “And it also helps me to check and balance—that why should I complain, why should I think about small-small things, why shouldn’t I do something better and bigger not only for myself, for others as well? Because if I enjoy life, if I control life, if I feel how life is important, then I should spread the message to others—those who don’t see it the same way; those who spoil their life behind drugs, behind this and that. Tell them how beautiful is that, just to live.”

  Later that afternoon, on the same day he heard the angels, the hospital let Rais go. Because he was unfamiliar with the American health care system, he assumed this was a good thing. If they didn’t need to do anything further, then he would probably, with God’s blessing, recover quickly. On the other hand, his jaw wasn’t moving, he could not speak, his right eye remained closed, and the right half of his head looked like ostrich leather. All this even a devout optimist had to acknowledge.

  IN THAT MOURNING house in Dhaka, the phone rang. It had been nearly a week since the mysterious call from Texas. Rais did not know his family had received that first call and so figured they knew nothing. He wanted to be able to move his jaw properly when he explained that, on a rainy afternoon, some man had fired dozens of scalding pellets into the right side of his face with a double-barreled Derringer pistol, and that he had nearly made it to heaven.

  The family, with no news to go on, had seen its shock yield to grief, and grief begin to make way for transcendence. Now Rais’s mother picked up the phone. This time, only silence. Then a hint of a grunt zipped through the undersea cables and into her ear. It wasn’t much. It was enough. “This is me, Ripon,” his shattered jaw mumbled, using a nickname from an earlier, happier time. “Amma, I am OK,” he managed to add.

  He cried, and she cried, and everyone in the house cried. For the longest time, no one spoke. They just held their phones to their ears and listened.

  Amma asked about the injury, about his course of treatment, about whether Rais could eat. Come home as soon as you can, she begged. Mightily she praised God.

  WHEN THEY ASKED him to leave the hospital, the day after admitting him, Rais had mumbled some concerns. He would be fine, they said. He needed to return very soon for something called Outpatient Treatment. This was some kind of hard-to-understand American invention where you leave injured so that you can return and have done to you what they could also just do right now. Somehow, the act of leaving emergency care and returning as this so-called Outpatient made life easier—for somebody, though for whom wasn’t obvious. It was not unlike the maddening rules of bureaucratic classification that gummed up every little thing back home. Apparently, becoming an outpatient changed whose problem you were, which in America mattered greatly.

  Still, Rais wondered: If there was more to do, why not just finish it off? He was right here. Why would they release him if he wasn’t whole? It would take time to understand that when an American hospital says you’re free to go, it may mean that they’re done with your insurance, not your problem.

  In Rais’s case, there was no insurance of any kind. Rais didn’t have it, and Salim said the station didn’t have it because he liked to keep costs down. It was part of his business model—that as well as recruiting old schoolmates as workers and mortgage-splitting housemates, by persuading them that toiling behind the counter of someone else’s convenience store was a swift path to owning your own.

  The hospital assessors saw Rais’s bills mounting. They were already in the thousands of dollars: not only the ER care but also the hospital filing fee, the ambulance fee, the 911 call fee. They saw a fledgling immigrant and gas station clerk, and they had their ways of predicting that he wouldn’t be good for the money. He was out of the hospital
that afternoon. He returned to Salim’s place with instructions to see an eye specialist by the name of Dr. Rand Spencer.

  As it happened, Dr. Spencer was a fellow pilot who understood how the prospect of losing an eye might especially frighten an ex–Air Force man, for whom sight was a source of power and distinction. “If that’s part of your identity, then you’ve lost that part of yourself,” he said. “From a psychological standpoint, it probably makes you feel like you’re less of a man than you used to be.” The doctor was a tall, solid oak of a man who wore tweed blazers over his scrubs. He was one of the leading eye surgeons in the city, and not cheap. The first appointment alone would be $500. Salim was generous enough to pay that bill himself. During the first consult, the doctor peered into Rais’s uncooperative right eye. It was full of blood—in the deep aspects of the socket and under the retina, where it risked destroying the rods and cones. The lens had been pierced by the pellets, and a cataract was forming. Yet the eye could faintly perceive light. It could, for example, tell if you were shining a flashlight into it. Without such light perception, there would have been no hope of saving it. But this was modestly good news. A surgery was scheduled.

  On the day of the shooting, Dallas police officers had come to Rais’s hospital bedside to show him images of known criminals. Hundreds of pictures. They all kind of looked the same to him, but he gamely picked four. They came to him again and again, and by early October he had narrowed his choice to two. Now, on the day of Rais’s first surgery, he saw on television the news that yet another mini-mart clerk had been shot. This one was at a Shell station in Mesquite. First Hasan, then him, and now an Indian named Patel. The first and the third had died at once. Rais was aware of being the lone survivor of the three: a strange, bittersweet stroke of luck. In the recent case, the store camera wasn’t a fake, and the TV showed a video of the crime. The man in the video, raving furiously at the clerk, was the same man who had barged in and wanted to know where Rais was from. He matched one of the two photographs Rais had picked.