The Gift of Our Wounds

by Arno Michaelis

  Ten or fifteen minutes went by and Amardeep and I were still reflecting when we saw Harpreet sprinting toward us from the temple. I held my breath. He’s running! I thought. Is that a good sign? Would he be running to give us bad news? To our disbelief, he raced right past us without even making eye contact. When he passed, I noticed his bulletproof vest was unfastened. That was typically what law enforcement did when they knew there was no longer a threat. Had I foolishly hypothesized that it was possible my father was a captive? It might have been a long shot, but it was our only hope of seeing him alive again.

  Watching Harpreet fly into the bowling alley, I got a bitter taste in my mouth. “Damn him!” I said to my brother. “Didn’t he just promise he would let us know what was going on?” Harpreet had chosen to play the part of FBI agent over friend. In that role, he was taught to keep everything close to the vest. Did he not understand our torment? Had he not taken pity on my mother, who was coming unhinged, waiting to know the fate of her husband? What if it had been his family who was suffering? I hated him at that moment.

  I barely had time to vent my anger when Amardeep and I were summoned into the bowling alley. An Oak Creek police officer led us solemnly down the stairs and into a private room filled with law enforcement officers. As we walked in, the teenage boys who had been pleading for information about their mom all day walked out sobbing.

  Amardeep and I took seats across the table from a team of FBI agents and local cops. Another dozen or so stood behind them, some in uniform, some wearing suits. Harpreet stood at the back of the room. One officer spoke for the group. “We regret to inform you that your father did not survive,” she said. Why didn’t I expect to hear that? Why didn’t I know when the boys left in tears that those of us who were left at the scene would not have a good ending?

  Bile surged from my stomach up into my throat. It didn’t matter that this woman was just the messenger. The full force of my rage was upon her. Teeth clenched, hands sweating, heart racing, I glared at her. A million thoughts ran through my mind. What took so long to tell us? How long did Dad suffer before actually passing away? What took the cops so long to enter the building? If they’d gotten inside sooner, could my father have been saved?

  Amardeep was crying, but I was too angry to shed tears. I didn’t want to spend another second in that room with those people. Don’t give me your sad faces and official bullshit lines, I thought to myself. You have no idea what you have put us through. You should have told my mom before she left. But they’d waited too long and now I would have to tell her that Dad was gone. I stood to leave, asking Amardeep to meet me back at Mom’s. I didn’t want anyone to drive with me. I needed solitude.

  Alone in my car, I raged. They were all cowards! The shooter was a coward for ambushing peace-loving people in their place of sanctuary. The cops were cowards for not going into the temple sooner and keeping us in the dark for so long. Harpreet was a coward for avoiding us when he knew that every minute was a minute more of suffering. Gurmail was a coward for hiding in the bathroom while my father was dying on the opposite side of the door. They were all fucking cowards! Every one of them!

  I screamed all the way to my parents’ house, so long and loud that my throat was raw. Was I going mad? I didn’t know any other way to unleash the wrath and emotions attacking me. I was out of my mind with fear, fury, and an almost incomprehensible sadness. When I pulled into the driveway and saw my father’s American flag flying in the front yard, I screamed some more.

  I pulled myself together for the sake of my mother. Getting out of the car, I saw family members gathered outside the house, as if they were too afraid to go inside. Pausing to muster the courage for the task ahead, I asked myself, How will I do this? What will I say?

  Mom was standing inside the front door. She searched my face for answers. I tried to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come. Lord! I thought. I can’t speak! My mother fell to the floor, her body convulsing with sobs. I ran to her. First Amardeep and then the others followed. We all held each other and cried, as if our shared heartbreak might lighten the burden of our individual grief.

  No one slept that night.

  Arno

  When I saw the first tweets, I was forty-five minutes outside of Milwaukee, working on a client’s servers. BREAKING NEWS: Reports of shots fired and officer down at Seik [sic] Temple in Oak Creek … Active shooter on the scene Shooting Report of Officer down & 3 to 4 victims. Active shooter on scene. Mutual aid from several PD’s.

  I clicked on the hashtag #sikhtempleshooting, and all this stuff started streaming down the side of my laptop screen: Getting reports that 4 people were shot at Sikh Temple. Police not giving out any information yet … Scanner reports indicate Oak Creek Police cannot find shooter at Sikh Temple—crew on scene says it is “chaos.” … Multiple shooters reported.

  As soon as I heard the Sikh temple was under siege, my gut told me what no one was reporting yet. This was a strike by the radicalized American far-right movement. An attack to say, “You’re threatening our race and we’re going to eliminate you before you destroy us.” It had all the markings of white supremacists—specifically, racist skinheads, the faction I helped to establish nearly twenty years before.

  I didn’t know anything about Sikhs except that they looked different than white American males. What I did know was that in my former world, “different” was all that was needed to provoke an attack. Didn’t matter if you were black, brown, yellow, gay—anything but white, straight, and sympathetic to the cause, you were fair game.

  Waiting for more information to come out, I did the only thing I could think of. Late that afternoon, I posted a video on YouTube, appealing for peace and understanding.

  This atrocity that happened today hits home for me not only because I live in Milwaukee and this is in my backyard but also because there was a time in my life that I practiced the hate and violence that was the raw material behind this shooting. I can remember my own sense of urgency as I engaged in the paranoid lie that my race was under attack and I had to do something about it, otherwise my people would be wiped out. It’s a safe bet to say the shooter was attached to a very similar narrative that led him into a place of worship to murder people he’s never met before.

  I’m driven to look for some kind of answer to this senseless violence. I understand the most effective measure I can take is to practice compassion and kindness, unconditionally, and to broadcast it to everyone I come into contact with. It is not a stretch to say an act of kindness could have diverted this shooter from where he ended up today. “Hate begets hate; violence begets violence,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said. The same is true for peace and love.

  I finished my consulting job and spent the evening switching between social media and TV news. It was late when I learned that the shooter was a white supremacist. Right from the jump I’d suspected as much, but having it confirmed made my stomach turn.

  During my tenure of hate, I truly believed I was doing the crucial work of helping to save my imperiled race, as ridiculous as that sounded to me now. I was certain the shooter held the same reckless convictions, and six innocent people were dead because of it. Good people with families and friends and meaningful contributions to make to the world. Out of his own self-loathing and rage, the shooter had reached a point of disengagement from his own humanity and consequently the humanity of others around him. He didn’t look at his victims as human anymore. They were the objects of his blind hatred. I had been that person. I didn’t pull the trigger at the Sikh temple, but I had beaten people to near death. I had been terrified of the world around me. Everywhere I looked, I saw the work of the enemy. Anyone who wasn’t white was out to wipe out my people. Anyone who didn’t sympathize with the cause was a race traitor. I felt no remorse for the havoc I wrought—not until years later when I finally broke out of my cocoon of inhumanity.

  I was fortunate to have done a 180-degree turn, thanks to a family that refused to give up on me, the birth of my da
ughter, and the kindness of people I professed to hate. Returning to that world, even if just through memory, made my skin crawl. I didn’t need a name to know the shooter was someone so driven by hatred, so steeped in fear and ignorance, that the only way he could think to release his rage was by killing perceived enemies. People who, in his demented way of thinking, were a threat to him and his distorted worldview. What a complete fucking waste of beautiful human lives. When will it stop? I asked myself.

  I slept fitfully that night. What if the killer was someone I knew from my previous life? What if the songs I wrote while I was with Centurion influenced him? Crush your enemies with racial loyalty. It’s a racial holy war! Centurion! Blood, soil, and honor! White power music was seductive. It drew people in, provoked anger and violence, and sometimes even triggered murder, and our songs were iconic and easy to find on the internet. It hadn’t been too long ago—long after I’d left the movement and years into my peace work—that a neo-Nazi from Germany contacted me to ask if I’d be interested in reviving the band. I didn’t reply but I never forgot that the harm I’d set in motion was still hurting people.

  I heard the name Wade Michael Page for the first time the next morning when I turned on the TV. The name wasn’t familiar, and for that I was grateful. News reports said he had been on the watch lists of organizations that monitored hate groups because of his longtime ties to the white supremacist movement and his role as the leader of his own white power band. He attended Hammerfest, the white supremacist music festival inspired by concerts that I had helped organize back in the day. One photo showed him in a Confederate flag t-shirt, showing off a tattoo on his left arm. It was the number “14,” representing the fourteen words that racist skinheads lived by—that I had once lived by: We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

  I left my white power skinhead self behind long ago, tossed him out, stomped on him, and swore that I’d spend the rest of my life atoning for his terrible acts. I knew that the shadow of that person and his crimes against humanity would follow me. Every time something like this happened, it reminded me that, as committed as I was to practicing loving kindness and working for a peaceful world, I would never be able to sweep away all of the fragments of my racist past. I would live with that until the day I died.

  As I stared at Wade Page’s photograph, I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone had ever been kind enough to reassure him that he was better than that, as the brave black woman at McDonald’s had once done for me.

  It might have saved lives.

  EIGHT

  THE INVESTIGATION

  Falsehood may be practiced a hundred times; it is still false.

  Guru Nanak Dev Ji

  Pardeep

  A photo of my brother praying on his knees in the bowling alley parking lot became the face of the temple massacre. Newspapers featured it prominently on their front pages. Television stations led with it. Only two weeks earlier, a mass shooter had killed twelve people during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. I’d watched the coverage on TV. Now the image of our family’s anguish was everywhere. At a time when we were at our most vulnerable, people were taking our picture. I wondered, How did our tragedy become their entertainment?

  As a member of an already marginalized community, I felt even more victimized by the vague responses from law enforcement to everything I asked about my father’s final moments. Sikhs believe that our destiny has been written, so I accepted my father’s death as God’s will. But, as his son, I needed to know what happened to him. I didn’t understand the reticence of the local police chief and the FBI investigators working the case to answer the most basic things. What harm would come from telling us whether Dad was shot first or last, whether he died quickly or suffered longer? How would we ever get closure with so many open questions?

  Out of pure frustration, and to satisfy my own gnawing need for answers, I set out to learn what I could on my own. I talked to people who escaped with their lives, as well as local cops who agreed to tell me things they’d heard around their precincts, provided I promised not to betray their confidence. Little by little, I was able to separate fact from fiction and piece many things together.

  Sunday services at the Gurudwara typically attracted three hundred worshippers, but that day, because the shooter came early, only thirty or forty were there when the rampage began.

  Mom and Dad drove separately that morning. Mom arrived at the temple first to help in the kitchen. Dad came in a few minutes later to begin setting up for the main service. After morning prayers, he went to the kitchen to fix his usual cup of tea. Mom and a dozen or so other women were already preparing the traditional Punjabi dishes of fried samosas and poori to be served at the afternoon langar meal. Dad was in good spirits, chitchatting with other congregants about raising money for Prakash Singh, a priest who had emigrated from India seven years earlier and had finally been able to bring his wife and two young children here. The family was about to move into their first apartment and needed help getting started.

  As people arrived in dribs and drabs, Wade Michael Page left his apartment in Cudahy to drive the seven miles to Oak Creek. He got to the temple and parked his red pickup at the top of the parking lot. Dressed in a white t-shirt and dark pants and armed with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, he walked to a spot where he could see everyone who came and went.

  Sita Singh, a forty-one-year-old priest, pulled into the lot a moment later. Sita, who had moved from New York City only six months earlier, came to relieve his older brother Ranjit of his temple duties so that Ranjit could go to his job at a grocery store. At the same time Ranjit was leaving the Gurudwara, Sita was walking toward it. When they stopped to greet each other, Page opened fire.

  Thirty yards away—the distance between bases on a baseball field—Amanat Singh and her eleven-year-old brother Abhay (whose name means “fearless”) were playing outside the temple. Their parents were hosting that day’s langar meal in honor of Amanat’s ninth birthday and had run to the grocery store to fetch extra paper plates. The siblings were told to stay inside, but had decided to go out for air when the kitchen got too warm. They were sitting on a crate, singing and giggling, when they noticed the stocky, balding white man with glasses get out of his pickup.

  For an instant, the children thought the man was lost and needed directions; but, without any warning, he pulled a gun from his holster and fired several shots at the brothers. Ranjit fell to the pavement, his chest and stomach riddled with bullets. Sita collapsed on top of him, struck several times in the back. Both had been mortally wounded.

  Hearing shots outside, Dad ran from the kitchen toward the main entrance to see where the shots were coming from. At the same time, the terrified children ran into the kitchen to warn the others. “Someone killed the babaji!” they cried. Someone killed the priest! They had barely gotten the words out when Page stepped into the temple with his gun drawn.

  I know that my father’s first concern would have been the safety of everyone else, but I don’t know where he was in the temple when Page started shooting. He may have been with the team of priests who’d been meeting in the foyer to plan the day’s songs and scriptures. He could have gone back to the prayer hall, where early worshippers had been saying their morning prayers. Nevertheless, everyone scattered, some people toward the kitchen at one end of the temple, others toward the living quarters at the opposite end.

  Prakash Singh ran to the room near the kitchen where his children were watching TV, waiting for Sunday school to begin. Bursting through the door, he tossed a set of keys to his daughter, Palmeet, and ordered her and her brother to lock themselves down in the basement. His distraught wife was close behind him. She and her children ran downstairs together. Others were already hiding there. In true character, Prakash ran back toward the prayer hall to try to help others. The decision would cost him his life.

  From somewhere inside the temple, Dad made his first 911 call. In a loud but controlled voi
ce, he said, “We are having a problem here at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin. The guy is firing! We need 911 quick!” The sounds of gunfire and people shouting and screaming could be heard in the background.

  All over the temple, people ran for their lives. They hid wherever they could find cover. Behind locked doors. In closets. Around corners. A bullet grazed one woman as she hid behind a large column in the main foyer. She ran into the kitchen, shouting, “I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot.”

  Mom locked the kitchen door, grabbed the two children and the injured woman, and led everyone into the impossibly tight quarters of the kitchen pantry. It was dark and sweltering inside, with barely room to turn around, but there was nowhere else to hide. Using the light from her phone, she quietly tended to the woman with the only thing she could find, a few paper napkins. As she dabbed the blood on the woman’s arm, she heard shots and screams coming from the direction of the prayer hall. Everyone in the pantry started to pray. Many had loved ones outside. Mom prayed for Dad’s safety. She knew he would take on the role of protector of the flock.

  Page shot randomly from inside the foyer. One of his bullets penetrated the metal frame of the doors to the prayer hall. Mom believes the screams she heard were Paramjit Kaur, who had been praying in there at the takhat, the throne holding the Guru Granth Sahib, our holy scriptures, just before the shooting started. Paramjit was the mother of the heartbroken teenage boys I’d seen at the bowling alley. She hadn’t been able to get out of the prayer hall fast enough and Page executed her as she knelt in a corner in prayer. She was forty-one.

  After killing Paramjit, the shooter moved down the hallway toward the kitchen. A few seconds earlier, the women in the pantry smelled burning and two ran back to turn off ovens that were left on inadvertently in everyone’s haste to hide. While they were rushing around the kitchen, they heard someone cry out a warning. “He is coming! He is coming!” Page appeared on the other side of the counter separating the kitchen from the fellowship hall. Taking a shooter’s stance, he fired at the women, grazing both before they could get back into the pantry. Miraculously, he moved on to his next target. He must have surmised that the pantry door led outside. Had he pursued them, everyone in the pantry would likely have been murdered.