The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  Rais was terrified of the looming trial. Because prosecutors wanted the maximum sentence for Mark Stroman, the trial didn’t involve the attempted murder of Rais, but rather the actual murder of Vasudev Patel. Still, the DA’s office had subpoenaed Rais’s testimony, and he wanted to do his duty, no matter how hard it would be. In the days before the trial, anxiety nibbled on him day and night. “I was very scared that somebody will shoot me, will try to kill me,” he said. He felt convinced that to be there, in the same room as Mark Stroman, in a building likely crawling with members of his association, was dangerous. But he had no choice. On the first day of the trial, the authorities were kind enough to pick Rais up at home early in the morning and drop him off at night. When he confessed his fears, they allayed them by entering the Frank Crowley Courts Building through a back door and ensconcing him in a small office not far from the 292nd District courtroom, where the trial would occur. He could sit there in peace until it was his time to testify in the penalty phase—that is, assuming Mark Stroman was convicted.

  On the trial’s opening day, April 1, 2002, Rais sat tight in that office. He refused even to go to the bathroom. A soldier-cum-film-buff couldn’t be tricked so easily. “You see many times in the movies that in the bathroom crimes take place,” Rais said. “People just go and snatch that head or this kind of thing. So I was very scared that if I go to the bathroom, who knows? Maybe Stroman or someone is following me, and they will go to the bathroom with me, and then try to kill me.”

  187

  Ladies and gentlemen, in this case the evidence will show the following. It will show that on the morning of October fourth, 2001, that Vasudev Patel awoke, he got ready for work, he left his wife and his two children at their Mesquite home, and he drove a few miles to the Shell station that he operated at John West Road and Big Town Boulevard in Mesquite. He opened that station at approximately 5:30 a.m. that morning and began waiting on customers. And the evidence will show that he was working by himself that morning.

  The evidence will also show that approximately 6:45 a.m. a man drove up to that Shell station in a silver Ford Thunderbird. He was also alone. The evidence will show that he was not a customer; he had not come there to purchase anything. Instead, the evidence will show that he was armed with a .44 Magnum caliber revolver. This man pulled up a bandana over his face and exited that Ford Thunderbird with that weapon. The evidence will show that that man is this man right here, Mark Anthony Stroman.

  The evidence will show that Mr. Stroman walked to the front door of that Shell station. That when he did so, he already had that revolver down by his side ready for use. He got to that front door, he opened the front door of that Shell station. Mr. Patel was behind the counter. This man over here, Mark Anthony Stroman, as he opened that door, yelled out to Mr. Patel to give him the money in that station.

  Now Mr. Patel kept a .22 caliber pistol under the counter for his protection. The evidence will show that as he saw this man come in armed with that .44 caliber revolver, that he reached under the counter for his weapon. As he did so, this individual raised up that .44 and pointed it at him. And Mr. Patel then backed away from the counter with that gun. And as he did so, this individual, Mark Anthony Stroman, shot him once with the .44 Magnum.

  He struck him up here in the left-upper portion of his torso. And that weapon then tore through his collarbone and broke it. It broke five ribs. It penetrated Mr. Patel’s left lung, and it finally lodged in his lower back, and Mr. Patel fell to the floor behind the counter.

  And as he did so, the evidence will show that this individual here, Mark Anthony Stroman, immediately reached over the counter for that cash register. He knocked over the keyboard in front of that cash register. He attempted to open the register but couldn’t find the key. He then looked across and pointed the gun down at Mr. Patel and started threatening to shoot him again if he didn’t open that register for him. Mr. Patel couldn’t move by that time and he was down on the floor.

  And so what Mr. Stroman did at that time was he took that .44, he put it into his waistband and reached over with both hands and attempted again to open that register. And again he was unsuccessful in his attempts. At this point then he leaned across and threatened to blow Mr. Patel’s brains out if he didn’t open that register for him. And the evidence will show that, actually, as he said that, he was reaching in his waistband for that .44 Magnum. And at that time he glanced slightly to the left to where the windows were in that station. He immediately took his hands away from that revolver and hurriedly left out the front door.

  The prosecutor went on to describe the arrest and the ballistics tests, and then he brought his opening statement to its conclusion.

  The evidence will show that that man’s intent there on October fourth was one thing, and that was to go in there to rob Mr. Patel and to murder him in the process.

  THE TRIAL OF Mark Stroman began on April Fool’s Day 2002. For simplicity’s sake, the state had charged him with just one of his attacks—the Shell station murder of Vasudev Patel. The trial was assigned to Judge Henry Wade Jr., of the city’s 292nd Judicial District Court. The courtroom was in the Frank Crowley Courts Building, in that buzzing judicial hive on North Riverfront Boulevard. It was an imposing, eleven-story fortress—its lobby six sets of stairs above the street—that handled the whole spectrum of legal affairs in the city: indictments and arraignments, sentencings and paroles, divorces and speeding-ticket contestations.

  It was a depressing old place, where the conveyor-belt operators at security seemed to exhale their boredom in the face of every entrant and workers in the cafeteria mumbled during one break about the next break and the clerks looked up only after you’d been talking awhile. In the basement, men in sleeveless undershirts sat waiting for a chapter of their record to be handed over, and they gave the impression of being regulars. On another floor, a woman sat before a receptionist, trying to explain that the complaint she wanted to make involved domestic violence and that she preferred to speak in private. On floor after floor, families sat hoping to learn the fate of fathers and brothers and sons and, on some occasions, of mothers and sisters and daughters. They moved through a building whose bones were steadily weakening with time: the local press called its elevators shaky and “cantankerous,” disparaged its bathrooms for emitting sewer smells, its floors for their long cracks, its thermostat system for making it icy in some courtrooms while steamy in others.

  Judge Wade, in the 292nd District courtroom, had the advantage of having worked every side of a criminal case. Once an officer and instructor pilot in the U.S. Air Force, he had worked as a trial lawyer after law school; then as a prosecutor, conducting a hundred jury trials; then as a criminal defense attorney; and, finally, since 1995, as a judge. Though his obligations in this case were potentially daunting, he gave Stroman a good feeling. Something about Wade fostered trust in an anxious defendant.

  On that first day of the trial, many worlds collided. Rais Bhuiyan was hiding from Stroman’s associates in that small office and avoiding the bathroom. The widows of Hasan and Patel were in the courtroom. Stroman was of course there. Tena, his estranged wife, and three of his four children were there. Tom Boston was there.

  The trial they had come to witness would boil down to one overwhelming question: should Mark Stroman continue living? It had become the focal question by a strange, improbable path.

  In the months between the shootings and the trial, Mark Stroman had widely advertised himself to the world as a hate criminal. There was a strange television interview he gave in February, by telephone from jail, in which he admitted to the shootings and reportedly justified them: “We’re at war. I did what I had to do. I did it to retaliate against those who retaliated against us.” That month, while being transferred between units at the Lew Sterrett county jail, Stroman was written up for saying to a guard, “You’d think it was illegal to kill Arabs around here.” He had obviously mistaken his captor for a sympathizer. When the guard informed him that, yes
, it is illegal, Stroman retorted, “If you had loved ones they killed, you’d kill ’em, too.”

  In the letters he wrote from prison, he was equally blunt—and not merely about Arabs. “I don’t know how much longer I can stand all these fuckin ‘niggers,’ ” he wrote to a friend soon after arriving. Beneath these words, he drew a Confederate flag and scrawled “Forever free!!!” In another letter, a new living arrangement seemed to bring relief: “I got a new cellie, he is ‘white.’ That’s good, but he beat some fag to death with a fuckin hammer, only 35 times in the head. Damn! I thought I had a few issues :) He don’t like nager’s at all, so now there are 3 of us in for murder, all white. The nager’s are worried about us :) Hell I’m even worried about us. Haha.” At times he traded in jokes he enjoyed: “What’s the difference between a dead niger in the road or a dead dog in the road: dead dog gots skid marks in front of it.”

  As during his earlier stints in prison, Stroman’s whiteness became even more salient to him in that setting. The way he saw it, to be white in a Texas prison was, in an inversion of the usual rules, to be a victim from the start. Mark, like many of his buddies who had done time, was obsessed by visions of how big and ruthless the black prisoners were. Tena remembered her husband’s saying how “loud and obnoxious” he’d found the black inmates. If white guys like them didn’t band together, didn’t strike before they were struck, they stood no chance. This was part of the logic of an affiliation that Stroman claimed in prison—the “Peckerwood Warriors.”

  The term “peckerwood” was a long-standing epithet in the rural South for poor whites, in the same genus as “redneck” and “cracker”—sometimes slung derisively at them, sometimes embraced pridefully by them. It had become favored by the white-power movement more recently and had reportedly come into use as a label for aspiring associates of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist prison gang and meth-trading crime syndicate that Stroman was sometimes said, inconclusively, to have run with. News reports connected him to the highly secretive group. His daughter Amber said, “From the beginning, he’s been a lieutenant. That’s the highest rank you can get in Aryan Brothers.” Stroman himself denied it, citing his half-Mexican ex-wife as proof: “Now if I was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, me having a Spanish wife—that would kind of make me a hypocrite. You have to be—if being proud of who I am, my skin color, makes me a racist, then I’m a racist. But no, I’m not. I don’t hate the blacks, the Spanish. I don’t hate Jewish people. I don’t hate—well, I was gonna say, I still have animosity towards the Arabs. Seeing people being hung from bridges and decapitated, that still infuriates me. But no, I’m not a racist. I believe in being proud of who I am. My mother’s got a lot of Cherokee Indian in her, so I’m a mixture.”

  Stroman’s tattoos, photographed in detail after his arrest and offered in the trial as state exhibit No. 125, seemed to tell a different story. A swastika graced his right pectoral, and an indecipherable figure of some import appeared to be hanging off the side of it. Adjacent to it, just under the cross hanging from his neck, was etched “187,” presumably a reference to Section 187 of the California penal code, which begins, “Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought …” It was a common marker for men who claimed to have committed that act, in California or beyond. On his left pec was a rose, with “In Loving Memory” above it and “A Bro” below, which might or might not have referred to the Aryan Brotherhood. Between his pecs, a little way down toward the abdomen, were raging flames. Rather more moderately, the word “Harley” decorated a forearm.

  The state’s investigation also unearthed photos of Stroman horsing around in “SS” neo-Nazi T-shirts, calmly clutching a rifle and handgun in one snapshot, throwing his hands exuberantly skyward in another. A different picture showed two young children, apparently his own, standing before a neo-Nazi flag and giving their best little “Heil Hitler” salutes.

  Now in prison, Stroman stayed true to this record, mailing a friend on the outside a poem he loved about the Peckerwoods. Different versions of the poem floated around American lock-ups, and prosecutors would use its words against Stroman at the trial. They spoke to ideas of white pride and white power, and to the way they could become, in the eyes of certain prisoners, the only way to protect yourself inside:

  Peckerwood Warriors, down for a cause

  Texas convicts and solid outlaws

  The rules they live by are written in stone

  Awesome—fearless they are bad to the bone

  The unit they live on can’t take their pride

  They live in a warzone, they are ready to die

  There bodies are solid + blasted with ink

  To earn their bolts is how they think

  The strength they possess as they go into war

  Was passed down to them by the great mighty Thor

  They go into battle with their head held high

  Some will get hurt, others will die

  None of this matter’s, the battle is on

  They’ll fight to the finish, till their strength is all gone

  In time they grow calloused, ruthless + hard

  Small price to pay, to survive on the yard

  They are Peckerwood Warriors down for a cause

  Texas convicts and solid outlaws

  Some of Stroman’s correspondence rose above crude jokes and racist bluster to suggest something like a worldview. He claimed to be reading tons in prison, following the tentacular effects of 9/11 with particular interest: “I have never been on top of the news like I am now. It really sucks. This whole world is falling apart right before our eyes.” The ideas he formed from his readings and observation were grounded in a profound sense of besiegement. He felt himself and people like him to be standing on a shrinking platform at which minorities and immigrants and public dependents were nibbling away. This worldview was distilled in an eleven-point manifesto that he loved and often circulated to friends. It was yet another document that did the rounds among men of his ilk, and on the Internet it was sometimes falsely attributed to prominent people, only to see those claims debunked on “urban legends” sites. Stroman gave the manifesto his own title: “True American.” It declared:

  1. I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family not some midlevel governmental functionary with a bad comb-over who wants to give it away to crack addicts squirting out babies.

  2. I think playing with toy guns doesn’t make you a killer. I believe ignoring your kids and giving them Prozac might.

  3. I don’t think being a minority makes you noble or victimized.

  4. This is my life to live and not necessarily up to others expectations.

  5. I believe that if you are selling me a Dairy Queen shake, a pack of cigarettes or hotel room, you do it in English. As a matter of fact, If you are an American citizen, you should speak English. My uncles and forefathers shouldn’t have had to die in vain so you can leave the country you were born in to come here and disrespect ours and make us bend to your will.

  6. I don’t think just because you were not born in this country you qualify for any special loan programs, so you can open a hotel, a 7-Eleven, trinket shop or anything else.

  7. I believe a self-righteous liberal democrat with a cause, is more dangerous than a Hells Angel with an attitude.

  8. Our soldiers did not go to some foreign country and risk their lives in vain and defend our constitution so that decades later you can tell me it’s a living document, ever-changing, and is open to interpretation. The dudes who wrote it are light years ahead of us. So leave it alone.

  9. I never owned, or was a slave, and a large percentage of our forefathers weren’t wealthy enough to own one either so stop blaming me because prior white folks owned slaves, and remember tons of white, Indian, Chinese and other races have been slaves too.

  10. I don’t believe in “HATE CRIME” legislation, even suggesting it pisses me off. You’re telling me that someone who is a minority, gay, disable
d, another nationality, or otherwise different from the mainstream of this country, has more value as a human being than I do as a white male? If ya kill someone that’s a hate-crime. We don’t need more laws, we can’t enforce the ones we got.

  11. I will not be frowned upon or be looked down upon or be made to keep silent because I have these beliefs and opinions. I thought this country allowed me that right.

  Like this manifesto, Stroman’s worldview braided together a variety of ideologies and outlooks: Fox News talking-head talking points and Hells Angels fuck-the-worldism; Aryan Brotherhood racism and Texan exceptionalism; Cato Institute libertarianism and middle-aged white-guy bitterness; old-fashioned nativism and Focus on the Family–style concern about social decay; “True American” national pride and a post-9/11 clamoring for “moral clarity.” Yet his ideas, as they emerged in his own writings, spoke of a man who had not grappled with them so much as heard things often enough to pick out what he liked and didn’t. Stock phrases that affirmed his instincts stuck with him and became the basis of a philosophy.

  What had probably never occurred to Mark Stroman was that his tendency to hate could ultimately save his life. In fact, in Texas at this moment in time, it was different from what he suspected: committing a hate crime could get you off easy. If the state ascribed his actions to simple hatred, Stroman might have received nothing more than a life sentence. To give him the Death, as they sometimes called it in Texas, they had to accuse him of a fancier thing called capital murder—murder committed during one of a handful of other crimes, like arson or robbery. If a man entered a parking lot, shot a black guy because he was black, and sped away, he might well be looking at life. If he walked into a store and stuck up the same guy for $300 and then, having taken it, murdered him, he could get the Death. Another quirk of Texas law complicated the situation. Texas did not begin giving sentences of life without parole until 2005. Before that, recipients of life sentences were eligible for release, assuming good behavior, after forty years on the inside. In short, to accuse Stroman of a hate crime would be to risk his walking the streets someday.