The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  However, Tom also sensed the country changing in ways that he figured would nourish more Mark Stromans than Tom Bostons, in those cases where it could tip either way.

  “You look back years and years ago, and a family used to be this dad, the mom stayed at home, took care of the children, nurtured the kids, took care of the house—everything,” he said. “Then you start having a bad economy. Bills up, inflation’s up, more cost of food. So then you start breaking up the family unit. Mom’s at work, the dad’s out working, then who’s with the kids? Then the schools. If you got a good school, your kid may turn out all right. That’s the private sector. If you go to public schools, it’s like a war zone, so that’s like a mini-type prison.” He had managed to place his own children in private school.

  Though Tom had suffered abuse and knew its toll, a part of him even wondered if modern taboos against hitting one’s children were hurting the young: “I look today now, where kids aren’t getting spanked with a belt, they aren’t getting reprimanded, and our whole society’s going to shit because of things like that. And I’m not saying beat your freaking kids. Your dad would say, ‘I’m gonna get out the belt.’ And he wouldn’t get it out, but you had to have the threat.”

  Tom went on, “You’ve got trouble-makers as kids that don’t have any respect for their parents or people, and they’re off on the wrong track already. So then you can’t discipline the children; the schools can’t discipline children; they’re not getting it at home. They’re little hellions. They’re spoiled.” It begins with rebellions like Mark’s long years earlier, he said, and no one knows how to nip them in the bud: “They get in trouble, they go through the system, and it just snowballs.”

  Everybody’s always got a choice, Tom had said at first. The more he talked, the muddier it got.

  BOB DARK, THE junior prosecutor, stood before the jury and began the first of the closing statements of the penalty phase: “You’re not responsible for the defendant being in the position he is, facing the death sentence. So don’t for a moment think that you are. Don’t go off on any guilt trip like the defense will probably have you do. The defendant got himself in this jam by his own conscious, deliberate choices. For the past twenty years, he’s left a trail of crimes and victims. His criminal history is a road map that leads directly to the death house.”

  Dark told the jury that rehabilitation wasn’t possible for a man like Stroman. He couldn’t, and wouldn’t, change. Then the prosecutor turned to the mitigation question. Had the defense given satisfactory reasons for why Stroman’s past somehow excused his deeds? “Oh sure, we heard from some professionals from the defense,” Dark said. “It’s that same stuff. When all else fails, blame your parents for not giving you enough love or because they disciplined you. That’s what they fall back on for you to feel some mitigation, some sympathy for this man. The sympathy should be for victims in this case.” Dark said the real choice facing the jurors was whether or not to spare Stroman’s future victims, because this defendant would surely strike again: “He will never learn. He is the way he is. No one is going to change him. He’s a consumer of life, not a contributor to it.”

  Jim Oatman rose and, with Stroman beside him, tried to cast his client as a kind of all-American terrorist. Here was a man life had given no shot and who, like so many errant young boys in unpronounceable republics, was given renewed purpose by the notion of jihad.

  “Ask yourself, did this man over here choose his parents? Did he choose that she might abuse drugs or alcohol? Did he choose that she would not even come when he’s facing execution? Did he choose that he would flunk in school? Did he choose to have that stuttering problem that he had? No, he didn’t choose those things. Things happened to him in his life.” Of course, Oatman conceded, Stroman made bad choices, too. But the combination of the choices he never had and his poor selection among the ones he did have left him coldly alone, convinced that no one loved him. This isolation, Oatman argued, fertilized his client’s mind for the idea of waging a reverse jihad.

  “Terrorism and racism reaches out for those people,” Oatman said. “Says, ‘We’ll love you. Come in to us. And because of what you believe about Muslims, what you believe about religion, we’ll give you life everlasting. And if you’ll strap a bomb to your body or fly an airplane into a building, you will have done for the glory of God.’ ”

  Finally, it was the lead prosecutor’s turn. Greg Davis began by apologizing to the victims of Mark Stroman’s crimes and their families, because Texas “has made several mistakes with him,” he said. All those years ago, the state had put him on probation instead of jailing him, sent him home to give him another chance, told him to do better, try harder. Those days of leniency, that “horrible deadly mistake we made with him”—it was all over now.

  Davis’s approach in closing was to present Mark Stroman as a false prophet of the American dream who got in the way of people actually living it.

  He spoke of the Hasans, the Patels, Rais Bhuiyan—of how they had left their certainties and come to America in pursuit of hazy dreams. “You see, if there’s any true Americans here in this courtroom, this isn’t one of them here,” Davis said, speaking of Stroman. “These people back here who actually believed in the ideals enough to leave their homeland to come here—why? Because they believed that this was the country where you could pursue your life, liberty, and happiness. That it was that great of a country.

  “And it is a great country. It’s a great enough country that even a cold-blooded murderer like this sitting over here can be given full due process. And it is a wonderful country we live in. But those dreams were wiped out. And they become nightmares now. Why? Because this man over here had another dream.” Davis quoted Stroman’s own words: “His dream was to kill them all. To kill them all.”

  IT WAS IMPORTANT to Stroman that he be wearing a Harley T-shirt when the decision came. He asked Tena to buy it and bring it to him. His lawyers wanted him more formal, but he figured it was best to be himself. He was sitting there in that T-shirt, with a little American flag on his table, when the jurors came back. It hadn’t taken them long.

  The jury foreman, Lloyd Roberts, addressed the judge. On Special Issue No. 1, they found unanimously in the affirmative. Yes, Stroman would be a continuing threat. On Special Issue No. 2, they found unanimously in the negative. No, there was nothing in Stroman’s past to mitigate what he had done.

  So the Death it would be.

  Judge Wade officially informed Stroman of his sentence. An order would be sent to the executioners “to carry out this sentence of death by intravenous injection of a substance or substances, in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause your death, until you are dead.”

  Judge Wade looked over to the defense table. “Mr. Stroman, good luck to you,” he said.

  “Have a good one,” Stroman said. “Thank you, sir.”

  Hospitaliano!

  Would Abida remember the magnets they hung? Would she remember when they would speak on the phone after midnight, in the earliest days, slamming the phone down when a snooping relative picked up? Would she remember giving him recipes when he lived in that house in Queens, long before the day of the bee stings?

  Even if she did, would it matter?

  There was no way to know but to return. It was the end of 2002, and Rais was at last taking off from Dallas for a trip to Dhaka. It had been more than a year. The doctors had cleared him to fly. He left, bound for a woman who had waited long enough to become a wife.

  THEY MET AT a relative’s home. When Abida saw his face, she told Rais it looked good; she was surprised not to see scars. Aside from this comment, though, it was instantly clear to Rais that something was wrong—something that hadn’t been communicated to him (or, just as likely, hadn’t been heard) over the phone: “She was a different person, no emotion or feelings in her voice or face. Seems like she did not know me and we’re there to have a formal conversation.” She needed to give Rais some news: “She told me she has changed and w
as going to marry according to her family’s choice.” Her family had already chosen someone, in fact, and she would respect their decision. “She can’t come back, it’s too late, and I should move on with my own life” was the message a stunned suitor took away.

  “She said that she couldn’t wait for me anymore, and it was too much pressure from the family,” Rais said. “She had to move on. And I did not blame her, because I know that she was always under pressure. So this shooting incident expedited her mom’s efforts to push her more: ‘Now this guy’s shot, and he’s stuck there; he cannot come back, so how long you gonna wait? Blah, blah, blah.’ If you hear same thing every single day, how long you can go with the same bullying?”

  Rais knew he could win Abida back. He just needed time; she just needed to see him in person some more, to reconnect and remember. It needed to be less abstract. He went over to her house in the ensuing days to talk further, to dig out what sentiments could be saved. But Abida was cool and seemed to have “changed mentally,” Rais felt: “She didn’t show any sign of feelings or love towards me.” It was like a different soul in the same body.

  In one of their conversations, Abida brought up a delicate subject, on which she needed Rais’s cooperation. A few weeks before Rais left Bangladesh in 1999, he and Abida, without telling anyone, had quietly secured a marriage certificate from the government. They intended it, Rais said, “as a last resort to save her from marrying someone else as per her mother’s choice.” They didn’t consider themselves married, as there had been no ceremony before God. Now Abida asked Rais to sign some paperwork to annul that union. Rais sensed that he had some leverage: “I did not agree with that because I wanted her to come back.” It wasn’t long before a letter seeking a divorce arrived by post.

  “The relation ended like an Unsolved Mysteries case,” Rais said. They hadn’t even formally said good-bye: “There was no hug or touching, or any angry conversation.”

  History—big or small, national or personal—is little more than the story of the collision of perceptions, as a wise historian once wrote. So it was with Rais and Abida. For as long as they’d been together, Abida had been at once awed and frightened by Rais’s ever-swerving dreams; her persistent questioning about Texas had betrayed a recurring anxiety that he was always elevating something—his ambitions, perhaps his friends, who knows what—above his commitment to her. In Rais’s mind, it had been precisely the other way around. He loved the rhythms of New York. He had gone to Texas to make money and save up and get a big house and be able to pay for a proper wedding, all so he could take Abida away from that obstructionist mother and that hard country and into a life worthy of her virtue and beauty.

  Rais thought of all he’d done to keep that dream alive. The planning, scheming, and waiting; the paperwork, applications, and visas. In weaker moments, Rais added to that list: being shot. If it weren’t for Abida, he would have happily taken his Diversity Visa, stayed in New York, and gotten along fine. “I felt betrayed at that point,” he said. “That after doing all these things, all the hardship I went through, I came back home, and now you’re leaving. I felt really extreme pain in my heart, and I wanted to give up.”

  It felt at times like another shot full of burning pellets. The effects, at least, were similar. Rais couldn’t find sleep many nights. He couldn’t get himself to eat and watched his body slowly wither by the day. He spent most of the time in his bedroom and didn’t want to talk to anyone. He taunted himself by playing his and Abida’s favorite songs. He recognized in himself the depressed characters he’d known from movie screens—he sensed particular resonances with Shahrukh Khan’s character in the hit Bollywood film Devdas, although without the alcoholism. His mother, meanwhile, was crying every day, wondering why God would doubly betray her sunshine boy.

  Days grew into weeks. Rais’s sadness began to disgust him. It was dragging the family down. His depression had become everyone else’s, too. One day, he was managing to eat some breakfast around noon. His mother wanted to talk to him. She hugged him and, crying, delivered a simple message: enough.

  “Just forgive her in the name of God,” Amma said of Abida. “Maybe it’s good for you and her that she moved on with her life. Think positively that God gave your life back not to destroy with someone who failed to keep her promise.”

  Rais clutched her and cried and knew that she was right: “I could not go with the pain anymore, and I didn’t want my mother to cry anymore. I said to her, ‘I am back to you. I won’t think about her anymore.’ ”

  It took time for that aspiration to come true, but slowly the pain and shock within Rais began to yield to something more like transcendence: “I was thinking every single day, that is it really worth it to give up life for a woman, for someone I loved so much?” Maybe his error hadn’t been in selecting Abida, but more generally in devoting himself to the bounties of the below-world. Instead of replacing her, he would turn his attention toward more godly things, eternal and changeless things. He sometimes managed to convince himself that he was better off without her. “Is it my loss or her loss that we’re going apart?” he asked himself. “It’s not my loss—I thought about this. She is losing me. I’m not losing her.”

  As he convinced himself of so many things, he tried to convince himself that his pain had to stop. How could he abandon his cause? How could he forget that he was marked, was bound for other, greater destinies?

  “I cannot lose all these goals just for this one incident,” Rais told himself. And thus in April 2003, as an American president from Texas launched his second war in the Muslim world, Rais flew back from that world and resumed the Texan life that he’d launched because of Abida—now without her, and determined all the same.

  THE OLIVE GARDEN was just off 635 in Mesquite, on a stretch of Americana where the restaurants were little manors, each with its own parking lot, theme, and breed of systematized friendliness. It hung just below the highway, surrounded by a variety of establishments peddling that special American blend of casual, corporate-efficient, and faux-subversive: an Outback Steakhouse (“No rules, just right”), a Hooters (“Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined”), a McDonald’s (“I’m lovin’ it”), and a TGI Friday’s (“In here, it’s always Friday”).

  Phil Amlong was a manager at this particular Olive Garden. He was silver-haired, a little pudgy, a man who lived by the corporate mantra of “Hospitaliano!” Amlong never forgot that customers were to be called “guests” and that you couldn’t tell if a man was a cocktail guy or wine guy just by looking at him. He remembered how one day a nice young man from Bangladesh walked into the restaurant and applied for a job. Rais came recommended by his friend and compatriot Malik, who already worked there. Rais had no experience serving food, it was true, but the young man was good at turning personal needs into more general-sounding imperatives. He told the management that he needed a break and that he would make them proud one day. He got two weeks to prove himself. Before long, he was working double shifts on the weekends.

  The new job allowed Rais to move out of his friend’s apartment and get his own one-bedroom place, on Milton Street in Dallas, for $570 a month. It was a big step to live on his own. Even without the use of a right eye, he had grown comfortable leaving the house, making his way around the city, visiting the Richardson mosque or friends’ homes. But a part of him still trembled at what Mark Stroman’s associates might do if they finally tracked him down. He had contracted a phobia without its own prefix—of these tattooed people, skinheads, maybe white people; he wasn’t even sure whom to fear—but time had convinced him that dodging them wasn’t sustainable. He had to put himself back out there, and he calculated that a restaurant, filled with people throughout the day, would be safer than a gas station. “I need to go and start doing something that will help me to overcome the fear,” he figured. “Then I thought about going to restaurants and working, because it’s a safe environment. You get to meet a lot of people, so I’ll be able to get a chance to talk to people and ove
rcome my fear.” And it was true that if a man wished to face and transcend his fears of white people, the Olive Garden was an excellent choice.

  To work at the Olive Garden is no joke. You have to know what you’re doing and bear the company spirit, lest your guests ever feel like customers. At the outset, there are menus and protocols to memorize, exams to take, and a mini-apprenticeship with a seasoned server. “You go through a classroom, basically, is what you’re doing,” Phil Amlong said. You must learn to converse with your guests as though they’ve walked into your home and you want to impress them. You need to be able to rattle off names like Ravioli di Portobello as though they were your grandma’s recipes, to know your Mezzaluna from your Vesuvio, to remember without fail which wineglass goes with which grape. Every manager adds to the standard indoctrination some personal touches. Amlong, for instance, makes sure to teach new staff that there is a first time for every wine drinker, that it often happens at an Olive Garden, and that fruity reds are the tenderest way to lose that particular virginity. He taught recruits like Rais that prejudice was the greatest enemy of tips: “If you want to be a good waiter, take off the blinders. Don’t judge people by the way they look, what religion, their sexual preference, the way they dress. You don’t judge them, you treat them like the same way, and at the end of the day you make 25–30 percent.”