A convenience-store clerk shot in the face on September 21, 2001 spent a decade trying to stop the state of Texas from executing the man who blinded him.
He kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, "Lord, don't hold this sin against them!"
Acts 7:60
On September 21, twenty-five years to the day since it happened, the Houston Chronicle went looking for a man most of the country had forgotten. In 2001 a gunman named Mark Stroman walked into a Dallas-area convenience store and shot the clerk in the face. Stroman said he was avenging September 11, hunting men he took to be Muslim or Arab. The clerk was Rais Bhuiyan, a 27-year-old immigrant from Bangladesh. Pellets tore through his ear, cheek, nose, forehead, and eye. He survived, blinded on one side.
Bhuiyan was the only one who lived. Stroman killed two others: Waqar Hasan, 46, and Vasudev Patel, 49. Both had families. Both are still dead.
What Bhuiyan did next is the hard part. A decade later, he sued the state of Texas to stop Stroman's execution. He asked the widows first. He flew to New Jersey to deliver, by hand, a letter in which Stroman asked forgiveness. "I lost vision in one eye," Bhuiyan said, "but I gained a different vision in my heart." The suit failed. Stroman was executed on July 20, 2011, minutes after Bhuiyan pleaded for his life in open court.
He has spent the years since refusing to let it end there. He runs a foundation called World Without Hate, and he is now touring a documentary that interviews both survivors of hate crimes and the people who carried them out. The anniversary is why the Chronicle came looking. The work is why there was something to find.
The Bible tells an older version of this. In the book of Acts, a man named Stephen becomes the first follower of Jesus killed for his faith, stoned by a crowd after a religious council turns against him. As the stones came down, he knelt and prayed that the men killing him would not be charged with his death.
The parallel breaks in one place. Stephen forgave and died. Bhuiyan forgave, fought to keep his attacker alive, and lost. The mercy fixed nothing. His eye stayed dark, the two men stayed buried, the execution went ahead on schedule.
And he refused to hate anyway.
That refusal answered a question most people never think to ask. What was the hate ever going to give him back?