The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  The signature of Stroman’s mini-mart visits had been that he took nothing. In the case of Hasan, he walked in and just shot him; the police report noted a stash of $100 bills left untouched. In the case of Bhuiyan, same thing. But there was a wrinkle in the murder of Patel. The surveillance tape showed Stroman barging into the store, yelling something to the effect of “Give me the money,” shooting Patel, and then seeming to fumble with the register. Stroman took nothing in the end, but those words and that fumbling complicated things.

  The dilemma for prosecutors was this: even a cursory glance at Stroman’s history and statements, and at the details of the shootings, suggested that these were not really robberies. The man had taken no money. He had gone after an Indian, a Pakistani, and a Bangladeshi—the latter two Muslim, but none of them Arab—in the name of avenging attacks he and many others blamed on people who looked like them. “This whole September 11 thing has devastated everybody’s life,” Stroman said. “And then here I am—I step in and become an American terrorist.” For prosecutors, however, trying Stroman for a one-man War on Terror meant forgoing the death penalty, which meant his possibly reentering the free world. That outcome the government was unwilling to brook. They had had Stroman in their custody many times—starting with arrests before his armpits sprang hair—and yet had failed to reform him or lock him safely away. They were determined not to repeat their mistakes. Whatever the law, there was only one thing to do with a man like Stroman. Bob Dark, the junior prosecutor on the case, described it plainly: “This man needs to die.”

  A decision was reached. The Bhuiyan and Hasan shootings, where Stroman had taken nothing and sought nothing, would be put to the side. Stroman would be tried solely for the murder of Patel, during which he had barked “Give me the money” and fiddled in vain with the cash register. His attempt at a counter-jihad would be repackaged for a jury, and for posterity, as a garden-variety robbery-murder, committed to raise money for paying child support and bills—perhaps with a twist of hate but nothing more than that. Mark Stroman would be charged with capital murder, for killing Vasudev Patel “in the course of committing or attempting to commit robbery.”

  Years later, Bob Dark could safely admit that it was the hatred more than the robbery that motivated prosecutors. They didn’t seek the Death because of that “Give me the money.” They sought it to get rid of a hateful, incorrigibly violent man, and “Give me the money” became a legal pretext. “Probably the main decision in seeking the Death on him was sort of the retaliation factor that he had—seeking out foreigners,” Bob Dark said. As he talked further, he began to hedge: “I guess in his mind he thought he was retaliating on behalf of the country. At least that’s what I think he thought. What he was trying to convey was that he was acting on behalf of the American people. But what he was probably doing was acting on behalf of himself, trying to rob some people.”

  GREG DAVIS, THE lead prosecutor, stood before the jury and led off the opening statements. He framed the case as a simple robbery-murder centered on that utterance of “Give me the money.” In its facts the case was uncomplicated, and Stroman’s defense lawyer, an amiable man in his midforties by the name of Jim Oatman, made it simpler still. He decided not to give an opening statement, which was his chance to give the jury another frame for seeing the case. When the prosecution finished with many of its witnesses, Oatman declined to cross-examine them. “The defense has no questions,” he got used to saying. He also called no witnesses on Stroman’s behalf. He seemed to know something about his client’s chances that no one else did.

  The stakes of the proceedings could barely be felt in the way they unfolded. Here, the death of a man—and now the possible killing of the killer in turn—became boring and routine. It droned on like a school-board hearing more than a capital-murder trial. There were just eleven witnesses in all. The prosecution called Alka Patel, the widow; a handful of police types to establish the basic, incontrovertible facts of the case; and a few of Stroman’s buddies, to whom he had boasted about doing some robberies and killing some Arabs.

  The prosecution rested. Then Oatman rose: “Your Honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the defense will rest its case-in-chief.” What should be noted is that its case had also just begun. The beginning of the defense of Mark Stroman was also its end, because his team called no witnesses. The court adjourned early that day, to give the judge time to prepare instructions for the jury.

  The jury’s duty wouldn’t be easy. The Death is not often thought of as a philosophical affair. If the country as a whole seemed to be losing faith in capital punishment, Texas was the stubborn outlier. Its system was often labeled corrupt and racist and inept. But even in Texas, it wasn’t effortless to get rid of a man. It remained a grave, complex endeavor, for it required the asking of big, nettlesome questions about the nature of a man’s life. In the case of Texas vs. Stroman, No. 0140949V, stripping away the basics of where, when, and how, the ultimate decision—life versus death—depended on the jury’s answer to three such questions:

  Which was Mark Stroman’s sin in the killing of Patel—hatred or greed?

  Was Stroman irredeemably violent, or could he be changed?

  Had life given Stroman any choice but to become what he was?

  The first of the three questions—whether Stroman came to the Shell station as a robber or, in his telling, a counter-jihadist—belonged to this first phase of the trial, which was to decide his guilt or innocence. If Stroman was convicted, and convicted of capital murder rather than the generic kind, the latter two questions would come into play, as the jury considered how to dispose of his life.

  The jurors reconvened the next morning. The judge explained to them the intricacies of the charge of capital murder: “Our law provides that a person commits capital murder if he commits murder, and he intentionally commits the murder in the course of committing or attempting to commit robbery.” They were shown a surveillance video that showed the defendant doing that very thing, and then showed Vasudev Patel squirming and dying. During the presentation of the video, Alka Patel stepped outside the courtroom, wishing not to see it.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Bob Dark said in his closing, “this is a very dangerous, vicious man shown by the videotape. Mr. Patel didn’t have a chance. I’m sure when Mr. Patel awoke that morning on October fourth of 2001, he had no idea what was awaiting him when he got to that store. He probably figured it was just another day at work. Said good-bye to his wife. Children were probably still asleep; thought he’d be seeing them later on in the day. But, lo and behold, he was about to meet Mark Stroman. Ladies and gentlemen, you can take back the videotape with you when you go back to deliberate and look at it again. I know it’s a very shocking, very emotional thing to watch for the first time. But it just shows you what this man is capable of doing and what he did. The state will ask you to find this defendant guilty of capital murder, because that’s the only just, honest, and fair verdict in this case. Thank you very much.”

  Jim Oatman then rose and gave his closing, which was also his first real statement to the jury. He suggested that they find his client guilty of murder but not capital murder, which could bring the death sentence: “No doubt there’s a brutal crime, no doubt he deserves to pay, and I’m not asking you to acquit him. He is guilty of knowingly causing that man’s murder. He is a murderer. There’s no justification or excuse for that. When he fired that gun he was reasonably certain to have caused that result, which was that man’s death. But he didn’t have a specific intent. And as hard as that choice may be for you, if you watch that video and listen to yourself and stay true to your oath in this case to render a verdict based upon the law and the evidence, he is not guilty of capital murder. He is guilty of murder. I wish you well.”

  The jury departed for its deliberations and came back in less than an hour, around 11:15 a.m.

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?” the judge asked.

  “Yes, we have, Your Honor,” the foreman said. He pa
ssed a sheet of paper up to the bench.

  The judge read the verdict aloud: “We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of capital murder, as charged in the indictment.”

  The judge called a fifteen-minute break. At 11:30 a.m., the parties were to return to decide if Stroman deserved life or the Death.

  FOR THE JURY, the harder work now began. The set of facts in the case—the whodunit—was straightforward enough. The judge’s instructions, in the phase just ended, asked the jurors if they believed, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant was indeed the man who strode into that gas station, robbed, and killed. There was that complexity about specific intent to rob and capital murder. Still, by and large, a juror could feel fairly confident that Stroman was guilty as charged.

  Now the court wanted something more demanding from the jurors. They had to decide if Stroman should continue living. “He’s sealed his own fate,” Bob Dark said. “He’s walked himself to the death house. He’s like a cancer on society. And you twelve jurors have to be impersonal, as a surgeon is with his knife, and remove that cancer. It’s just like when you have gangrene of the body. You have to amputate that portion and save the person.”

  The jury would not make this decision in the way one might imagine. It had little to do with seeing crime-scene photos or watching lawyers bicker and witnesses sob. The jury had to decide if Stroman met certain conditions, and to do so by asking itself perhaps unanswerable questions about a man’s life and making and character. The jury would have to mull over what shaped this Stroman, what made him what he was. It would have to consider whether he could have become anything else—and whether, if allowed to live, albeit in prison, he could still.

  The court referred to these more speculative questions as “special issues.” First came Special Issue No. 1: “whether there is a probability that the defendant, Mark Anthony Stroman, would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society.” To answer yes, the twelve jurors would have to be unanimous. To answer no, at least ten would have to agree. Saying yes kept open the possibility of the Death; no guaranteed a life sentence. It was not an easy question, in part because the jury had to decide whether a man can pose a threat to “society” when confined to prison for the ensuing decades.

  If the first question yielded a yes, the jury would move on to Special Issue No. 2: “Do you find from the evidence, taking into consideration all of the evidence, including the circumstances of the offense, the defendant’s character and background, and the personal moral culpability of the defendant, that there is a sufficient mitigating circumstance or circumstances to warrant that a sentence of life imprisonment rather than death sentence be imposed?” Here the jury had to be unanimous to say no, nothing mitigated the crime, which would then lead to a sentence of death; if ten jurors found something mitigating in Stroman’s history, that would be enough to save him.

  This had ceased to be a trial about a crime and instead become a trial about a man’s nature—about whether there was any good reason to grant Mark Stroman the fortune of another act.

  The grist for this second phase of the trial would be fragments from the story of Stroman’s life. Like Tom Boston, who thought he knew Stroman intimately but didn’t know about three of his four children; like Tena, who had always loved the man but had never been able to hold him; like their children, who thought about Stroman far more often than they actually saw him; like the parade of police officers who would testify about Stroman’s arrests going back to boyhood in Plano—like all those who’d crossed his path, the jurors would come to know the defendant only in peeks. It hadn’t been the sort of life that anyone could wholly comprehend.

  It was hard for either side to turn the defendant into a fully realized character. Stroman was, in court as elsewhere, a screen for the visions of others. All that could be offered—one witness at a time, and in the accompanying documents submitted to the court—was a scattered portrait of where Mark Stroman had been and what he had known, and a panoply of theories about how a man like this is manufactured. For the juror, there was no clear way to separate verities from falsehood in this retelling. There was no straightforward guide to who was lying and who was telling it as it had been. Even so, the portrait might give a feeling for the man, and a feeling could perhaps grow into a verdict.

  THE JURORS WERE asked to picture him, this little boy with a stutter ripe for teasing and wisps of red hair and ears as big as his cheeks. He comes into the world on October 13, 1969. His birth certificate contains a secret that would not be revealed to him for years: he was not Mark Baker, as he would long assume; he was, in fact, Mark Stroman. His father was not that sputtering old truck of a man called Wallace whom Mark would grow up with but some old consort of his mother’s whom he would never truly know. In the corner of America he entered, it was more and more like that.

  Tena Stroman, Mark’s maternal aunt, and the defense’s expert-witness psychologist all argued to the jury that the Bakers’ home in Plano was not a good place to make the mistake of being young. Tena put it simply enough: “They didn’t want nothing disturbing what was going on with their life.”

  Jurors heard story after story about Mark’s early years on Latham Drive and later Kidwell Circle in Plano. Not long after Mark’s birth, his mother, Sandra, ran off without explanation, leaving the three children with her mother. The family had supposedly gotten a call some months later from a hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, saying that Sandra had been found pregnant and lying feebly in a gutter. Her own sister, Sue Carlson, testified that she returned, expecting twins, lived at their father’s place until the delivery, gave the twins away for adoption, and finally returned home.

  The jury heard from her sister that Sandra was a neat freak, with a “compulsive disorder on cleanliness,” whose own children—Mark and his two sisters—were “never allowed to sit on the furniture.” Carlson also described the heavy drinking whose air filled the household like turned milk: the “happy hour” that Sandra and Wallace regularly threw themselves around 4 or 5 p.m., which invariably led to fighting and calling each other “every name under the sun”; the requirement that when such drinking began, the children keep themselves to their bedrooms, because Wallace just wanted to have his drink, chew on his dinner, and be alone with his wife, however much they quarreled. Carlson even remembered a Christmas dinner at Wallace and Sandra’s when Wallace insisted that the children eat in their bedrooms. She had heard Wallace calling Mark “stupid,” “ignorant,” “dumb,” “worthless.” She claimed that Wallace kicked Mark in the head and thumped him in the ear and forehead.

  “Sandra and Wallace lived, and still live, in their own world. They have a confined life to where nothing is important to them except them,” Carlson testified. Later she added of Mark Stroman: “He didn’t have a chance, sir. He didn’t have a chance that most children have. He was put out from his own parents, not feeling welcomed or loved. He didn’t have the nurturing that a child deserves.”

  Tena, who had married Mark when she was fifteen, seemed to share this idea of Stroman as a victim of fortune, a man who couldn’t be expected to transcend his parentage. She told the jury of a principle by which Wallace had raised him: “If Mark would get into trouble, or if he had somebody was picking on him, he would tell Mark if he didn’t go back and whip him, that he was going to get whipped—that Wallace was going to spank him.” Tena also claimed that “they would put him in his room for days and make him read the dictionary.” A psychiatric evaluation from 1983 noted another punishment used in that home: because Mark was allergic to grass, he was often required to cut it.

  “Mark stayed grounded most of his life when he was there,” Sue Carlson said.

  The defense’s psychologist, Mary Connell, testified that Mark’s mother once said something to him about having been $50 short of the money required to abort the fetus that became him. She told him this story with regret at having been so broke. “She said she wished she had had a dog,” the psych
ologist told the jury. “That it would have been better if she’d had dogs instead of children.”

  The jury also heard—from Tena and the psychologist and others—of an important escape hatch in Mark’s boyhood days: his grandparents. They were his maternal grandmother and stepgrandfather, to be precise, and they had a construction business of their own. They were somewhat more prosperous than Wallace and Sandra and lived on Old Seagoville Road, in an almost bucolic corner of southeastern Dallas. Their house was wide and low, set on a five-acre property where they kept horses that young Mark loved to feed. It was surrounded by quiet lanes, shaded by a canopy of trees, on which he loved to ride his bike. Several witnesses spoke about how Mark would bolt to Old Seagoville whenever he fled Plano on two wheels.

  “Mr. Cox loved Mark,” Tena Stroman said of the grandfather. “He always told him to be a good man, to grow up, take care of his family, work and be there for his family. He loved Mark. Mark loved his grandpa.”

  The facts of Mark Stroman’s early life, dreary as they seemed, were not altogether unknown in his social milieu. It was a familiar cycle: a boy born to a tired, scattered father who wasn’t really his father; passing through some combination of childhood misdemeanors, extra hours on school tests, special ed, visits by probation officers, stints in boys’ homes and juvenile prison; and landing at last on the giving end of tired, scattered fatherhood.