The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (37 page)

“I want to know all these things, to close this chapter and move on with my own life, for my own sake, for my mental peace,” he went on. “If Mark Stroman is gone, who is going to give me this answer? And as a victim I have the right to talk to him, to get from him all these answers—for my own sake, for my mental peace, so I can move on by closing this chapter and open a different chapter—and leave this one in peace.”

Wahid had gambled their case on this moment, and his bet paid off. For the first time in a long time, things seemed to be turning their way. Maybe Rais’s luck had returned. The judge was clearly sympathetic, interested in Wahid’s argument, hanging on Rais’s every word. Rais could see it in the judge’s eyes. He even noticed the court reporter weeping.

“Thank you,” Wahid said. “Nothing else.”

IN HUNTSVILLE, ZIV
and the others had taken a short car ride to the prison around 5 p.m. They were led to a cafeteria in its administrative building, where a guard and a Texas Ranger watched over them. They would remain there until all the appeals ended and it was time for the execution. Most of their possessions, including their phones, had been taken away, and so there was little to distract them. The cafeteria had vending machines, but the visitors had no money. Ziv and the others remained mostly silent. They knew only that cases
were being heard, arguments being made, about Stroman’s fate in various forums—in state and federal courts, from Austin to New Orleans and all the way to Washington, D.C. But they had no idea which way things were blowing. “You just sit there like an idiot,” Ziv said.

What they did know was that the execution was supposed to occur at 6 p.m., which meant their having to move again, to the death chamber, before that. When 6 p.m. came along and nothing happened, the silence broke. People started wondering what was going on. Ziv went to chat up a guard about how they would know, when they would know. The man was what Ziv called “guardy-looking”: genial, with a crew cut and the all-American appearance of a marine. He told Ziv that he was awaiting a call from something called “the office of the unit,” which would give instructions.

As 6 p.m. ripened into 7, for once there was hope. Ziv’s guard friend now told him that it was unusual to have such a delay. If it went on much longer, given the extensive protocols involved, they would likely have to withdraw the death warrant: the whole business had to be complete before midnight on July 20, in order not to violate the law. Ziv and the others were thrilled. It could, Ziv figured, mean Mark’s going to the back of the line, having to get a fresh date. It would be a miracle. “The last time this happened, a couple years ago, the guy was not executed,” the guard told Ziv.

It wasn’t everything, but it was something. Rais would at last get his occasion to meet Stroman. Ziv, whatever his reservations about Rais, now marveled that the man’s desperate move might have worked. The consensus in the cafeteria shifted its weight toward optimism. Maybe, even probably, it wouldn’t happen tonight.

BACK IN AUSTIN,
the judge offered the state attorney a chance to cross-examine Rais.

“Mr. Bhuiyan,” the state attorney began, “I know you’ve been through a lot, and I really hate to put you through anything more,
but I was just wondering if you ever received any compensation from the state victims’ compensation fund for your injuries?”

Rais explained that he had, thanks to his doctor’s office applying on his behalf.

“Thank you. That’s all the questions I have,” the state attorney said.

Wahid now requested a chance to ask something further from Rais. It had occurred to him that the support Rais had corralled from the families of the other two victims might be important to the judge. Rais claimed that both families were “absolutely” supportive of his campaign.

Wahid asked Rais, “To your knowledge, and I can put them on as well, but if you know, just to expedite things, did they ever get any notice of any victim-offender dialogue?”

“OK, hold on just a second,” the judge interrupted. A phone had rung in the court. It belonged to the state attorney.

“This is it,” the state attorney said to the court. Then he was talking into the phone: “OK. All right, can you send me that document? OK. Great. Just e-mail it to me. All right. Thanks.”

Rais stared at the state attorney as he spoke. “I could hear his voice was louder than ever before,” he said. “He sounded very happy and he kept telling, ‘OK, OK, great, great.’ So then I realized that he is getting some message which is going to help him to kill this guy today.”

After hanging up, the state attorney addressed the judge: “The Court of Criminal Appeals has granted a writ of prohibition preventing this court from moving forward.”

Silence fell on the courtroom. Rais looked around, confused. Hadi Jawad remembers the incredible stillness in the room in that moment, and the feeling of breath being punched out of you.

The judge looked to Wahid. “Counsel, you understand that. Is there any question about that in your mind?”

“No,” Wahid said.

“OK. Based on that, then, I cannot proceed,” the judge said. “I am prohibited from proceeding by the Court of Criminal Appeals. And this hearing will be terminated at this time.” He looked over to Rais. “You may step down. Thank you.” Rais was sobbing in his hands.

“Y’all be at ease,” the judge said. A moment later, he added, “You all are excused—except I’d like to …” And here he came down from the bench, walked over to Rais and shook his hand. The court reporter, the tears welling in her eyes, approached Rais and said how sorry she was.

Rais’s mind raced. He pressed Wahid: There must be something we can do. What can we do? Anything? What if … Rais now thought of that Clint Eastwood movie
True Crime
, where the execution is interrupted after the lethal injection has begun. So there had to be a way to reach the governor, the parole board—someone, something. As Rais shuffled through these strategies, he was awash in tears. Whom we do know? What connections can we use?

Wahid recalled Rais’s optimism even in that moment: “He kind of said, ‘OK, what’s next?’ because we kept having a ‘what’s next.’ And everybody was like, ‘What’s next?’ Even my own legal team were like ‘What’s next?’

“There’s no next,” Wahid told them.

A FEW MINUTES
later, around 8 p.m., in that cafeteria in Huntsville, a shrill ring blared out of a wall-mounted phone. It was that “office of the unit” phone. The guard walked down the corridor to pick it up, and Ziv followed him, now that they were friends. The guard listened, then turned to Ziv and summed it all up: “We need to go.”

The room broke out in tears and the spontaneous holding of hands. The group set out toward the execution chamber—across the street, past television crews with their bright lights and a crowd of people who had come to witness the evening’s events and/or protest against them.

In that crowd was Rick Halperin, who had brought a few carloads
of activists down from Dallas—including many who had signed up after Rais’s earliest presentations at the Amnesty and Texas Coalition chapter meetings. A prison spokesman had emerged a little before 6 p.m. and said there was some kind of delay. A delay was rare—any deviation from plan was rare—and optimism had rippled through the crowd, as it had through the cafeteria. What everyone was now waiting for, and dreading, was the sight of the prisoner’s guests emerging from their waiting area and walking into the killing chamber. When Halperin and the other activists saw Ziv and the other witnesses leaving the cafeteria for another building, they knew it was over, and many broke out in tears.

Ziv walked into the main prison building, past the visitation area, through the courtyard, past the buildings full of cells. It was a walk not of seconds but minutes, enough to feel the gravity of the occasion. Then on the left Ziv saw it: a low-slung building “completely architecturally different,” devoted solely to ending lives. The sight of the building stirred in Ziv a distant memory; he couldn’t quite pinpoint it. It hit him: it was the gas chamber, as plain and nondescript as this building, that he had visited with his father at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.

They were guided into the viewing room. Ziv remembered it as improbably small, with a low ceiling. The darkness of the room focused one’s eyes on the glass window of import, beyond which was the green-painted chamber of which Stroman had sent the Templetons a photograph years earlier. By the time Ziv arrived in the viewing room, Stroman was already strapped to the gurney, ready to go. He could only nod at his friends from the world after he saw them filing in. A dark-suited warden stood behind Stroman, wearing sunglasses indoors. Somehow the scene made Ziv think of the Madame Tussauds wax museum: everyone frozen in place, playing their little role.

The chaplain blessed Stroman with whispered prayers and caressed his ankle to soothe him. After a time, the green wall in the
death room mysteriously opened: it had a scarcely visible door that Ziv hadn’t noticed. A suited man ducked in, said “Warden proceeds,” and retreated without turning around.

The theater of the Death is just about perfectly rehearsed and directed, and Stroman knew this was his cue. “The Lord Jesus Christ be with me,” he said into the microphone. “I am at peace. Hate is going on in this world, and it has to stop. One second of hate will cause a lifetime of pain. Even though I lay on this gurney, seconds away from my death, I am at total peace. I’m still a proud American—Texas loud, Texas proud. God bless America. God bless everyone. Let’s do this damn thing.”

With that, his last-words time officially ended, but Stroman had a few more to share, these perhaps unscripted: “I love you, all of you. It’s all good. It’s been a great honor.” Because this was unauthorized riffing, the drugs were already pushing through the tube as he spoke, down the needle, through the white-bandaged hole in his skin, and into the busy traffic of his veins.

“I feel it,” he said. “I am going to sleep now. Goodnight. One, two, there it goes …” His eyes shut.

A doctor emerged from what seemed to Ziv like another hidden door. He placed his fingers on Stroman’s neck and looked for a pulse that wasn’t there. He bent toward the microphone into which Stroman had spoken and confirmed that the Death had claimed Stroman at 8:53 p.m.

Ziv and the others were, before they knew it, back at the Execution Suite, in its parking lot, meeting with the chaplain who had caressed Stroman’s ankle. He needed to hand over the worldly possessions that Stroman had bequeathed to them. Out of several bags of meshed net they emerged: a Swintec 2410CC typewriter, an electric coffee machine, legal documents, dozens of letters that Stroman had been too backlogged to answer, the pictures he had begged the free world to send, and some food items from the commissary that he had perhaps miscalculated being able to finish.

RAIS AND HIS
team, who had wanted to be in Huntsville on this day but couldn’t because of the appeals, had returned to the La Quinta Inn around 8:30 p.m. They slumped into chairs in the lobby. The news soon arrived. Rais sobbed and sobbed. That pitiful, tattooed man to whom God had strangely bound him had left for “the other side of the light,” as Stroman once put it: “pumped full of toxic bug juice, in the name of justice.”

T
he phone rang in the thick of night. He picked up: it was Western Union on the line. After all those hours he put in earlier, they still weren’t done with him. They were calling to say that, yes, they may have charged the $17 transaction fee twice but, no, with this there would be no refunds.

For once, Rais snapped: Did they really need to wake him up for that? As long as the Stroman girl received the money, he was at peace.

It had been one of those “crazy busy” days, as Americans called it. A month had passed since Mark Stroman left the world, and Rais was balancing the resumption of normalcy with his new duties as a campaigner against hate crimes. He was building a website for his new organization, World Without Hate, and was hoping to raise money for it. But he was also determined not to slack off at work, lest he lose the bread and butter that made this other pursuit possible. So on this day he had put in long hours at the office, then gone
for an interview with Swiss television about his campaign to save Stroman. He had finished working, as was now customary, around 10:30 p.m.

One last task awaited. He drove to a nearby Western Union outlet to make an urgent money transfer. The timing wasn’t ideal, because his team of engineers was still working and ordinarily he would have rejoined them after the interview, but this transfer was important. Now the system wasn’t working at the shop. He decided to go home and try online. He had to finish quickly to make the day’s last prayer. He had missed too many already that week. Now even the website was betraying him. What was happening? It wouldn’t give him the MTCN code, and without it the transfer wouldn’t go through. A task of minutes stretched to fill two-plus hours. Prayer time came and went. Western Union put him on hold, but no one would pick up. All of this turmoil, he thought, just for wanting to do good.

Finally the transfer went through, but the system somehow charged Rais the $17 fee twice. Who cared. He sent the information to the recipient and went to bed—and then that phone call.

He was just happy he could help. The transfer was for $50 and was desperately needed. The recipient was Amber Stroman.