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| Mark Stroman |
A man who embarked on a shooting spree in what he claimed was retaliation for 9/11 has been executed at a prison in Texas.
The lone survivor of Mark Stroman's attack on convenience store workers in late 2001, Rais Bhuiyan, originally from Bangladesh, unsuccessfully sued to stop the execution, saying his religious beliefs as a Muslim required him to forgive the man. The courts denied his request.
Stroman, 41, had said hate in the world needed to end and asked for God's grace shortly before the fatal drugs began flowing into his arms. He was pronounced dead less than an hour after his final court appeal was rejected.
Stroman claimed the shooting spree that killed two men and injured a third targeted people from the Middle East, though all three victims were from south Asia. It was the death of 49-year-old Vasudev Patel, from India, that put Stroman on death row. He was also charged but not tried in the shooting death of Waqar Hasan, 46, a Pakistani immigrant who moved to Dallas in 2001 to open a convenience store.
Stroman's execution was the eighth this year in Texas. At least eight other inmates have execution dates in the coming weeks.
From inside the death chamber, Stroman looked at five friends watching through a window and told them he loved them.
"Even though I lay on this gurney, seconds away from my death, I am at total peace," he said. He called himself "still a proud American, Texas loud, Texas proud".
"God bless America. God bless everyone," he added, then turned his head to the warden and said: "Let's do this damn thing."
Feeling the drugs beginning to take effect, he said, he began a countdown. "One, two," he said, slightly gasping. "There it goes."
Eleven minutes later, he was dead.
None of Patel's relatives attended the execution, and instead selected a police officer to represent them.
The execution was delayed for almost three hours before the Texas court of criminal appeals barred a state judge in Austin from considering Bhuiyan's lawsuit to stop the execution. The US supreme court had rejected appeals earlier in the day.
Bhuiyan had asked the courts to halt Stroman's execution and said he wanted to spend time with the inmate to learn more about why the shootings occurred. He lost sight in one of his eyes when Stroman shot him in the face.
"Killing him is not the solution," Bhuiyan said. "He's learning from his mistake. If he's given a chance, he's able to reach out to others and spread that message to others."
A federal district judge in Austin rejected the lawsuit and Bhuiyan's request for an injunction.
Stroman was free on bond for a gun possession arrest at the time of the attack. He had previous convictions for burglary, robbery, theft and credit card abuse, served at least two prison terms and was paroled twice. His juvenile record showed he was involved in an armed robbery at the age of 12.
When police arrested him the day Patel was killed, they found the .44-calibre handgun used in the shooting. Stroman confessed, and court documents show he told authorities he belonged to the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist prison gang. Prosecutors also said he told another jail inmate about the shootings and how automatic weapons police found in his car were intended for a planned attack at a shopping mall.
Stroman more recently denied the white supremacist description. He also had avoided trouble in prison in recent years, said a Texas department of criminal justice spokeswoman.
Stroman blamed the shootings on the loss of a sister in the collapse of one of the World Trade Centre towers – although prosecutors said in court documents that there was no firm evidence she ever existed.
"I wanted those Arabs to feel the same sense of vulnerability and uncertainty on American soil much like the mindset of chaos and bedlam that they were already accustomed to in their home country," he said on a website devoted to his case.
But he also said he'd made a "terrible mistake out of love, grief and anger" and had destroyed his victims' families "out of pure anger and stupidity".
"I'm not the monster the media portrays me," he said last week from death row.
Stroman was also charged but not tried in the shooting death of Waqar Hasan. Hasan was killed four days after the terrorists struck. The attack on Bhuiyan came a week later.
Man executed after appeals run out
Appeals court halts hearing while victim was testifying that he wanted to meet with condemned man.
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| Victim Rais Bhuiyan |
It was almost 8 p.m. Wednesday when Rais Bhuiyan finally got a chance to tell a judge why his attacker's execution, also scheduled for Wednesday evening, should be delayed so he could meet the man who tried to kill him.
"I would love him to explain, why? How?" said Bhuiyan, who was shot in the face by Mark Stroman during a crime spree in 2001 that left two of Stroman's other Dallas-area victims dead.
"When he shot me, I was bleeding," Bhuiyan said, crying. "What was going through his mind? Did he ever think about his kid? I'm somebody's kid as well."
Bhuiyan's poignant testimony was cut short when visiting state District Judge Joe Hart learned that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had issued an order prohibiting him from continuing.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Stroman's appeals, and he was put to death about 9 p.m.
"I would say that we just repealed the victims' rights act in Texas," said Bhuiyan's lawyer, Khurrum Wahid of Florida.
Bhuiyan, a 37-year-old from Bangladesh who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, was working as a convenience store clerk in Dallas in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when he was shot by Stroman, who according to testimony at his trial was a white supremacist who said he was out for revenge. Stroman has said his sister died in the attacks, but prosecutors have said there is no proof of that.
Stroman also fatally shot Waqar Hasan in his Dallas convenience store, and Vsudev Patel, a gas station attendant in nearby Mesquite. Both were immigrants — Patel from India and Hasan from Pakistan.
Bhuiyan, who works at a travel website, has said that his Muslim faith calls on him to forgive Stroman and that he wanted to break the cycle of violence and spare Stroman's life. He said he believes that Stroman was a product of his upbringing and has changed since the attack.
But his court bid focused solely on delaying the execution. He sued Gov. Rick Perry and Texas prison and parole officials this month in state District Court in Travis County, claiming that his rights as a crime victim had been violated. Particularly, he said, he was never told that the prison system offered mediation to victims of crime who want to speak with an offender.
Bhuiyan told Hart that the attack left him blind in one eye, ruined his marriage and threw him into deep depression and poverty.
"I couldn't believe I had to go through this in the best country in the world," he said.
He said that had been told during the prosecution of the case to avoid speaking to Stroman and that he only began to rebuild his life during a spiritual awakening on a trip to Mecca in 2009.
Asked by his lawyer why he wanted to speak to Stroman, Bhuiyan said: "I want to see him. I want to talk to him in person. I want to connect with him in a human way. I want to know many things, many questions."
Earlier in the day, Wahid, Bhuiyan and other members of his legal team were in federal court asking U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel to delay the execution. Yeakel denied the bid, saying he did not have the legal right to intervene, a decision that was later affirmed by an appellate court.
During the court hearings, Bhuiyan had by his side Paula Kurland, whose daughter, Mitzi Johnson Nalley, 21, was stabbed to death in a brutal 1986 attack in North Austin. Jonathan Nobles was executed in 1998 for the crime, and Kurland said she was only able to move on with her life after speaking to Nobles weeks before his execution.
"This is a life-changing event," Kurland said of the prison mediation.
As he left the Heman Sweatt Travis County Courthouse on Wednesday night, Bhuiyan looked shocked.
"He's gone," he said of Stroman. "Who's going to give me my answers?"
Source: S. Kreytak,
The Statesman, July 20, 2011
Lundbeck’s Pentobarbital kills its 21st patient in Texas on July 20, 2011
Gov. Rick Perry certainly found a
partner in crime, Lundbeck the death lab, to continue his killing spree. Mark Stroman was put to death in Huntsville yesterday and became Gov.
Rick Perry’s 233rd victim and
Lundbeck’s 21st patient.
Despite numerous pleas for clemency, including an
amazing campaign pursued over the course of several months by Mark Stroman’s surviving victim,
Rais Bhuyian, Texas continues to be the killing field of the United States. Not only Texas disrespects those on death row and their families, but it also ignores the
victims of crime it pretends to
protect and defend. Now, more than ever, it is clearly established that Gov. Rick Perry only listens to the calls for revenge and retribution from victims and their families. The voices of victims calling for peaceful and fair resolution are being gagged.
Evidently Texas remains on top of the most infamous list in the Western world, entering the 21st century as the champion of barbarity and medieval practices on all accounts.
Lundbeck is now responsible for 21 of the 29 executions carried out so far in the United States since December 2010.
Two more patients await Lundbeck’s treatment between now and the end of July 2011:
Andrew Grant DeYoung, Georgia, July 21, 2011
(execution to be carried out between the 20th and 27th)
Robert Jackson III, Delaware, July 29, 2011
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