The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  Amber Stroman entered the world on September 9, 1985. She favored Mark from the start, looked just like him. Tena and Mark were married the following January. She was fifteen; he was sixteen.

  The three of them lived in a place of their own down the street from Tena’s relatives. A portrait from the period shows them all dressed up, Mark in a dark jacket and red mullet, Tena looking older than her years in a sweater vest and a white shirt. They were young and in love, and she could tell Mark’s devotion by how he acted anytime another man so much as laid an eye on her. They fought and cleaved, Mark and Tena, fought and cleaved—but always loved.

  The jury learned of these things but also learned that, six weeks after their wedding, the police found Mark living alone and illegally in a vacant apartment in eastern Plano. His bicycle was propped up against the door to fend off people with guns and questions. A few months later, the cops caught him pointing a rifle at four boys and threatening them. On Christmas Day 1986, Mark was arrested for burglarizing a building. That crime was to steal food, according to one of his lawyers. Three weeks later, Tena gave birth to their second child, Robert. These facts were, again, easily available; the reasons behind the lurches remained for the jurors to interpret and explain.

  A parole officer who visited the Stromans around this time was able to muster some hope. “Prior to his marriage this past year,” the officer wrote, “he had a poor, negative attitude and seemed to have a chip on his shoulder. Since his marriage, he seems to have settled down and seems to realize his responsibilities of working and taking care of his wife and daughter, with another child on the way.” The officer noted that, although Mark’s education had not gone beyond middle school, he was now “seriously considering on getting his GED.” He was working full-time for the Layfield Construction Company out of Kearns, operating a bridge machine, taking home $331.26 a week and spending less than a fifth of that on rent and utilities. (This left it unclear why Stroman would be caught living in vacant houses around the same time.) The Stromans’ home on Clearfield Road was a “nicely furnished two bedroom frame house,” the report said. Mark and Tena were “very close and supportive of each other. Communication is very good.”

  The parole officer added, “Mark admits that he has in the past been associated with negative peers. He admits to a rugged life but now he is married with a small child and another child on the way. He works long hours and hopefully has settled down to a productive life.”

  Later that year, though, three days after Stroman’s eighteenth birthday, he and a buddy began a string of burglaries—burglaries in which, again and again, the thieving paused and the thieves ate some of the food they had found. After being caught, Mark confessed:

  On Friday, Oct 16, 1987 in the morning Charles Kenney and I went to the back of the house. We jumped the fence knocked on the back door. No one answered so we broke out the window. I went in and let Charles in the sliding glass door. I hit a bedroom and Charles sacking food. We gathered up the jewelry, and things we wanted and left the back way. We jumped the brick wall and entered a vaccant building and ate some of the food. We seperated some of the jewelry and left going to the vaccant house. I used the credit card (a Mobil card) from 3441 Ave N at Hwy 5 and Parker Rd to buy a carton of cigerettes and a case of beer.…

  On Monday Oct 19, 1987 during the morning Charles Kenney and I entered a vaccant house next to 1620 Armstrong. Open a window in vaccant house jumped out went into the back yard of the next house looked around and I broke the window. I entered and let Charles in the back door. Charles started taking the VCR. I started in the bedroom. We found coins, jewelery, knifes, camera, binos, jam box shirts, boots, hat, and a pillow case which we put everything into. We took everything to the vaccant house (next door) stashed VCR in the attic and we left with the jewelry and went to the vaccant house on Williamsburg. We seperated everything and we went to the Texas Pawn Shop and Charles pawned a pocket watch. In the vaccant house on Williamsburg we stashed the pillow case, the coin boxes and some of the jewelery. I took the coins from the collection to byuy food, that Charles and I ate.…

  It was around this time that Tena got the gash in her neck that she insists Mark didn’t cut. The jury heard the story from her, which gave a flavor of their life together. “Me and Mark was down at my grandmother’s,” she started. “And we were kids, we were kids. And we were down at my grandmother’s and we started off going to watch movies with my mom, and we winded up going getting beer. And we sat down there and we played quarters between the two of us with the case of beer, and we winded up getting drunk. And we walked home and left our car down there, and we got to arguing. And I got the knife and I acted—in my mind I knew I wasn’t going to hurt myself, but I got to acting—I acted towards him like I was …”

  She paused to find the right words.

  “… like I was going to cut my wrist. Because I didn’t think that he loved me anymore and I wanted him—I wanted to see that he would stop me. And so I acted like I was going to cut my wrist. And he come in there, and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said—you know, it just went into an argument. And he said, ‘Give me that knife.’ And I said, ‘No.’ I said, you know, I said, because I felt like I was pregnant. And I said, ‘I’m not—if we’re not going to be together, then, you know, I’ve already had one baby by myself,’ and I said, ‘I’m not doing it again.’ And he tried to take the knife away from me, and we had it, and he had his hands on it, and we were pulling at it like this. And he must have looked off or blinked or something, but it—I did like this, and when I did, it stabbed me right here.”

  The jury also heard how, on September 8, 1988, Tena gave birth to her third child, Erica. Mark, then eighteen, was on and off with Tena at this point, and it was one of his virtues that he treated Erica like his own daughter—though he and everyone else knew she wasn’t. He even tried to convince the authorities to let him be there for the birth, but a felony was a felony. He had robbed again, stealing rifles and jewelry and checks; he had then gone on a spree with those checks. This time the reckoning was serious. They gave him five years in hard time at TDC. Then a strange thing happened. Some official came to interview him in the Dallas County jail, where he was awaiting his transfer. Because of overcrowding in Texas penal facilities, there was an order to grant “parole in absentia” to certain prisoners before they even made it to prison. Despite his intimate personal history with Texas law enforcement over the years, Stroman was deemed suitable for release.

  On Election Day 1990, more than a year after he got out, Stroman was picked up, along with a buddy, at a Dillard’s store on Preston Road in Dallas. He had in his shopping bags a pair of cross-training shoes, a London Fog jacket, a bottle of Yves St. Laurent cologne and another scent by Polo, a woman’s purse, three men’s sweaters, two pairs of men’s pants, and three pairs of jeans. The $589 spree was the unintended courtesy of one Mrs. Terry Hanes, who was leaving a nearby Pep Boys a short while earlier when a man rushed up behind her, grabbed her neck, and jerked away her purse. This, too, was a felony—and now the second one. Mark pleaded guilty and received an eight-year sentence. But again he was paroled—perhaps for the same reasons as before, though the record isn’t clear—and freed after a matter of months.

  The jury heard how, during one of Mark’s stints in jail, his grandfather came to visit him. He told his grandson that he would likely die while Mark was serving out his sentence—and that Mark would probably lose Tena. As it happened, both prophecies came true. When Stroman emerged from his considerably abbreviated sentence in the middle of 1991, Mr. Cox had gone to the next world, and Tena was more or less finished with Mark.

  The defense lawyers presented no witnesses who could speak about Mark after this period. The people he’d known since boyhood mostly fell out of his life. New faces came into the picture. The expert-witness psychologist who was working for Mark’s side and interviewed him extensively testified that he became involved with a waitress named Shawna. The psychologist also testified a
bout his growing reliance on drugs in the 1990s—including meth. Stroman told the psychologist that sometimes he woke up early in the morning and saw trees out the window, and all he could think was that the narco police must be hiding in there. Mark told the psychologist that meth for him was like coffee for others—not some exotic drug, just the fuel he came to need to row himself through the days.

  For the next several years, however, Stroman stayed clear of police reports and prison terms. He appeared to be enjoying some measure of domestic tranquility, which meant that the state’s tracking of him mostly stopped. Then in the middle of 2001, not long after Rais Bhuiyan and Salim finished cleaning out the gas station and opened it for business, Stroman was out drinking one evening at the Texas Trap. He loved the joint, always had. Someone called 911 and reported that a man at the bar had a gun on him. One of the things Texas is strict about is keeping guns out of establishments where alcohol accounts for a majority of revenue. The police arrived around 6:15 p.m. and found a .45 caliber semiautomatic, with one round in the chamber and two in the magazine, tucked into Stroman’s waistline, just above the family jewels. They took him straight to jail. Fortunately for Stroman, he had some friends called the Templetons, who were generous people. He was friends with Bob and had gotten to know the parents, too.

  They bailed him out and brought him home. Soon he would be crashing on their living room sofa, not far from the gun cabinet that had grown fuller and fuller through the senior Mr. Templeton’s long service with the Dallas Police Department. Far from Dallas, meanwhile, final preparations were under way for a series of airplane attacks on the country Stroman so professed to love.

  AS IT TURNED out, Rais had been anguished about nothing. When they called him to the stand, they wanted only the barest details—where he lived at that time, the basic facts of his shooting, the identification of that man over there as the shooter. The purpose of bringing him up there was to remind the jury that in addition to the killing of Patel, who was the focus of the trial, Stroman had killed another man and shot a third. Most of the questions they asked Rais during his few minutes on the stand required monosyllabic confirmations more than answers.

  The happy news that Rais could give the jurors was that he’d had three eye surgeries and was awaiting the fourth. He hoped it might restore as much as a quarter of his vision.

  The judge thanked him and asked him to step down.

  THE LAST TWO witnesses for the defense during this punishment phase were its Hail Mary passes. As the evidence had mounted, it had grown harder to sustain the idea that Stroman would pose no continuing threat, that he would enter prison and somehow become a wallflower. What could be argued—though it might have offended every bone in Stroman’s “True American” body and struck him as typical liberal Democrat hogwash psychobabble—was that his past prevented him from turning out otherwise, that he should be spared because he could only have become what he had.

  Mary Connell, the defense’s expert psychologist, took the jury through a PowerPoint presentation about Stroman’s life: “As a baby enters the world, his chances for good development are best if he’s wanted, if he’s loved, if he’s the product of a stable family and a healthy pregnancy, if there’s been prenatal care that’s good, if there hasn’t been toxicity such as alcohol abuse on the part of the mother.” Stroman, she said, knew few of those advantages. She speculated that he could have had fetal alcohol syndrome, given his mother’s habits. She suggested that the back-and-forth between Plano and Seagoville would have disoriented Mark. The incessant needling by Wallace and the swipes about dogs and abortions by Sandra would have injured the boy’s self-esteem and his “confidence that his parent’s going to be there tomorrow and is going to love him and take care of him.”

  Dr. Connell sought to frame Stroman’s drug use in a similar way, to push it out of the choice column in the jury’s mind and into the column of predetermination. Once Mark got into meth, she said, he lost a great deal of control over himself. She attributed his rage and propensity to violence to the drug: “People who are using methamphetamine don’t lie around in a stupored state. They have lots of energy; they want to do things. They’re also agitated and aggressive.” She insisted, from her hours of interviewing Mark, that he believed someone was trying to kill him around the time that 9/11 came. She couldn’t tell if this fear was delusional or real, but what mattered was that the fear, combined with the drugs, would have placed Mark on a perpetual battle footing: “He was experiencing paranoid ideation at times and was, in fact, predisposed to suspiciousness and guardedness, as are many people who are drawn to this drug. The drug allows you to stay up and stay hyper-vigilant and keep a watch over your shoulders.”

  So when word of 9/11 reached Stroman, Dr. Connell testified, it might have given a tripped-out man a kind of permission: “When he heard about these incidents, he was in a state of heightened agitation, aggression, crazy thinking. And it affected him, perhaps, much as it affected many other people. But I think in many respects it affected him even more, and became for him kind of a license for an outlet for a lot of his aggression. Guns had always been a part of his life. He had a significant arsenal, and he was by now heavily armed, in a highly agitated paranoid state, and he took action. And he represented that he believed that anybody and everybody would have done the same thing if they’d had the nerve.”

  Dr. Connell was followed by a psychiatrist, Dr. Stonedale. She believed Stroman suffered from acute stress disorder, a precursor to the better-known post-traumatic stress disorder. Scans of Stroman’s brain, made after his incarceration, had found “generalized status slowing,” which could be consistent with epilepsy. There seemed to be swelling and damage to the brain, perhaps caused by drugs or by epilepsy. An MRI had found a wedge-shaped section of the brain, in the right frontal lobe, where the blood flow had all but stopped—again, a possible consequence of drug use or of injury. That area of the brain happened, Dr. Stonedale said, to be the area that governs emotion and impulsivity and acting-out. The doctor also noted that Mark was receiving Seroquel in prison—an antipsychotic drug used to treat depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. But Stroman was getting a “sub-therapeutic” dosage of 200 milligrams a day, in Dr. Stonedale’s view, when in fact he needed 600 to 800.

  As she closed, the doctor suddenly spoke more bluntly. It happened when Stroman’s lawyer asked if there were adequate programs in the prison system, and from the state more generally, for the addicted and otherwise troubled.

  “There’s very few programs, unfortunately,” Dr. Stonedale said. “I work at the Parkland psychiatric emergency room, and we have probably a dozen drug abusers a day coming in looking for programs. Some of them don’t really want to be helped, but a significant number of them do. And there aren’t any programs. There’s nowhere for them to go; there’s no funding. They’ll sit in our emergency room sometimes for twenty-four hours while we’re on the phone begging people to take them in. The system is broken. People doing drugs—you know, yes, no one is making them do it, understandably. But we’re not helping. We’re not doing anything to help them. We wait until they commit a heinous crime, and then put them to death.”

  For the jury, it might have been a jarring idea: that Texas didn’t necessarily execute people because they were irredeemable, bone-rotten murderers, but because it didn’t know what to do with them earlier in their lives, as they built up to that crime. It was a simple algorithm to kill people who had killed. But to unravel the knotted problem that Stroman had been for the government over the years—that took time and programs and subtle understanding.

  STROMAN MAY NOT have enjoyed the defense offered on his behalf. He believed in the right to make choices, as his manifesto and prison letters showed, and in the sovereignty of those choices in governing a life. He believed that casting a man as helpless robbed him of his dignity. He liked a quote he had clipped: “We don’t rise to the level of our abilities; we fall to the level of our excuses.”

  Tom Bosto
n, who attended the trial and who shared many of Mark’s intuitions about these things, wrestled long afterward with whether his buddy could or couldn’t have been otherwise.

  “Everybody’s always got a choice, at any point, no matter what part of their life,” he said. “They’ve always got a choice. And they may have a lot more obstacles than the normal person; they may have drawbacks, no matter what their situation. There are people that are quadriplegics, and they think the world’s against them because they don’t have arms and legs. But there is always something they can do. You can’t use excuses. A lot of our society uses excuses, and that’s what probably breeds a lot of the hate.”

  As he watched the trial, Tom felt himself swinging between excuses and condemnation in his own assessment of Mark. “I know that he wasn’t in his right mind,” Tom said. “Whether it was drug-induced, whether it was his childhood, or whether it was stress he was going through in life—whatever the reason was, the bottom line was, he wasn’t there. He wasn’t. It wasn’t something a normal person would do. So obviously I knew at that point it was a combination of drugs and stress and all the things he was going through, and he just hit rock-bottom.”

  Tom wasn’t sure if this was what they called mitigation in the court, but he also believed that execution was no solution. Maybe a life sentence would work, or maybe a mental hospital. But that belief also wavered the more he thought about it: “When you go back and you’re like, he’s just a piece of shit trash, do you just get rid of trash or do you keep them around?”

  The trouble with the excuses theory was that Tom’s life seemed to contradict its premises. “I was brought up in a dysfunctional family. I was beaten to shit as a child,” he said. His mother was a “pill popper” and merciless in her abuse. Tom thought of himself as a perfect candidate for an Oprah confessional or a Jerry Springer confrontation. “I don’t look back and say, ‘Well, I’m going to do this because I had this as a child.’ I mean, everybody’s got something in their childhood. Nobody has a storybook-perfect deal. And everybody’s got things that set them back. No matter whether it be alcoholism or finance problems or educational problems, whatever, you can come up with a million-zillion excuses. But you’ve gotta overcome that. It’s up to you as an individual.”