MESQUITE, Tex. -- Behind the counter of the Shell station here, Alka
Patel is at work, selling gas and cigarettes and chewing gum and lottery
tickets. At her feet, crammed into the tiny space, her teenaged son
toils at his homework.
It was at this exact spot last Oct. 4 that her husband, Vasudev Patel,
was shot dead. His killer, Mark Anthony Stroman, left the money behind.
His motive for the crime -- less than a month after the terrorist attacks
-- wasn't robbery, but retribution. Stroman said he wanted "to
retaliate on local Arab Americans, or whatever you want to call them."
Patel, 49, was an immigrant from India. His murder was one of more
than 80 hate crimes -- against Arabs, Muslims and others whose appearance
made them targets after the terrorist attacks -- that authorities have
prosecuted in the past year.
At least a dozen murders are being investigated as hate crimes by authorities.
Families of those victims say they share the grief of the families of
those who perished at the World Trade Center and Pentagon and who were
aboard the jetliners that crashed that day. But amid the commemorations
and observances of the first anniversary of Sept. 11, they feel forgotten.
Many of them will gather today for a ceremony in Mesa, Ariz., where
another Indian immigrant, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was shot to death last
Sept. 15 as he planted flowers outside his Chevron station. His alleged
killer -- Frank Rogue -- had raged at a bar of wanting to kill "ragheads"
responsible for the terrorist attacks, police said.
"If it wasn't for September 11, my husband would still be here,"
Alka Patel said from behind her counter. "Why shouldn't our families
be treated the same? I feel like we all have the same story."
The Patels' story here began when they moved to the Dallas area from
India, he in 1982 and she in 1987, when they were married. As with generations
of immigrants before them, the United States offered the opportunity
for a better life. They opened the Shell station in the middle-income
suburb of Mesquite, working behind the counter together.
Most mornings, Vasudev Patel would arrive early to open the station
and then call his wife at 6:30 to wake her up so she could get their
son and daughter off to school before joining him.
That schedule meant Alka Patel wasn't with her husband last Oct. 4,
when Stroman came to the station about 7 a.m. Already in the days immediately
after Sept. 11, Stroman had killed a store clerk from Pakistan and blinded
a clerk from Bangladesh in separate shootings. Stroman said, "God
bless America," fired a .44-cal. bullet into Vasudev Patel's chest
and left.
"I did what every American wanted to do but didn't," Stroman,
a 33-year-old white supremacist, later said in a television interview.
"They didn't have the nerve."
Convicted of Patel's murder, he now sits on Texas's death row. On the
day police arrested him, he had planned to go to a Dallas mosque, he
told a reporter this summer: "I was going to go in shooting Arabs."
Killer
of gas clerk gets death penalty
From the Dallas Morning News:
: Killer of gas clerk gets death penalty
: Family of victim in Sept. 11 retaliation is happy with sentence
: 04/05/2002
: By TIM WYATT / The Dallas Morning News
: A Dallas County jury handed the death penalty Thursday to a Dallas
man who claimed that a series of shootings last fall that killed two
immigrants and maimed another were retaliation for the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks.
: Mark Anthony Stroman, 33, received the death sentence after three
days of trial testimony and less than four hours of jury deliberations
for the Oct. 4 robbery and slaying of Vasudev Patel, a 49-year-old gas
station attendant in Mesquite.
: As state District Judge Henry Wade Jr. read the verdict, Mr. Stroman
nodded his head and then said: "Thank you, sir." He waved
briefly at family members while being led out of the courtroom.
: Mr. Stroman also is charged with two Dallas shootings that killed
convenience store owner Waqar Hasan, 46, on Sept. 15, and blinded Rais
Bhuiyan in one eye at a Pleasant Grove gas station a week later. Mr.
Stroman was not on trial in the September shootings but confessed to
all three after his Oct. 5 arrest by Mesquite police.
: The widows of Mr. Patel and Mr. Hasan left the court without commenting.
A family member, John Patel, said that his family was "very happy
with the verdict" and that the brutality of the killings called
for the death penalty.
: Teressa Talamantez said her brother-in-law "didn't do right"
by attacking the three men, "but now [Mr. Stroman's] children are
victims of this."
: "It's just more sadness," Ms. Talamantez said. "American
justice failed again. It's just not right."
: Prosecutor Greg Davis said the attacks were committed out of "pure
hatred" that claimed two lives and devastated victims' families.
: Mr. Stroman "attempted to say he was a patriot," Mr. Davis
said. "He was anything but a patriot. What he is, is just a common
vigilante."
: 'Chaotic mind'
:
: Defense attorney Jim Oatman had no comment after the verdict, but
during closing arguments he told jurors that until the World Trade Center
attack his client only talked of being a white separatist. After Sept.
11, he said, Mr. Stroman's actions turned violent for what his "chaotic
mind" twisted into a patriotic act.
: "He thought he was being a hero," Mr. Oatman argued. "He
thought that America would praise him and pin a medal on his chest."
: The prosecution vehemently disagreed.
: "If there are any true Americans here, it's these people,"
he said, pointing to the family members of Mr. Stroman's victims seated
in the gallery. "Not this man."
: Mr. Hasan, a Pakistani immigrant and father of four, moved to Dallas
last year from New Jersey to open a convenience store in Pleasant Grove.
He was shot once in the head while working behind the grill of Mom's
Grocery, but no money was taken from an open cash register.
: Mr. Bhuiyan emigrated from Bangladesh in 1999. He worked at a Texaco
station in Far East Dallas, where he was blinded in one eye by a single
blast by Mr. Stroman from a .410-gauge derringer. He testified Wednesday
that Mr. Stroman shot him in the face and walked out without taking
money from an open register.
: Mr. Patel was a naturalized U.S. citizen who worked 18-hour days
at the Shell station on Big Town Boulevard to support his wife and two
children. Mr. Stroman shot him in the chest with a .44-caliber revolver.