FORT SMITH -- On a night last October, Abraham Davis borrowed his mother's white minivan, drove a friend to a Fort Smith mosque and stood guard as the friend drew swastikas and curses on its windows and doors.
Even as he faced up to six years in prison for the act, Davis could not explain why he had done it.
Davis, just shy of 21, had grown up in Fort Smith. His father, charismatic but violent, died when Davis was 5.
"Most of my life I've spent trying to train myself to become something that's too strong to be broken through," Davis said.
As a poor student in the high school on the wealthier side of town, Davis often felt like an outsider. He got into a lot of fights. He did poorly in school, but he doesn't remember his teachers seeming surprised. Expectations were low, and he bent to fit them. He slept a lot in class. At 18, he dropped out.
He became aimless in a city that is growing and becoming more diverse. Hispanics go to Fort Smith to work in the poultry industry. Pho shops dot the city's main drag, the property of Vietnamese who began arriving as refugees after the fall of Saigon. R&R's Curry Express serves deliciously spicy North Indian food at a Finish Line gas station.
Muslims from different countries arrived, too -- some to study, some to work in the city's growing medical industry. Many had money.
Hisham Yasin was one of the founders of the mosque that Davis helped vandalize. They called it Al Salam -- meaning "peace" in Arabic. Since 2009, it has been in a brick ranch formerly used as a law office. It is on a busy road, South 28th Street, between a library branch and a nursing home.
The founders wanted it that way. They thought the Muslims of Fort Smith should be forthright and confident, which they thought would help them gain the community's trust and respect.
But until the vandalism, few people in Fort Smith knew that Muslims lived in their city.
Davis did. He had gone to high school with Yasin's older son, Wasim Yasin. They often ate lunch together in the cafeteria. Sometimes it wasn't easy being Muslim in high school, Wasim said. But around Davis, it was.
"Abraham was a good guy, a 'whatever' kind of guy, he never had any problems with that," Wasim Yasin said. "You know how people can talk about Muslims. He came up to me and he said: 'I'm with you, man. If anybody bothers you, just let me know. I'm your friend.'"
Months passed after the vandalism without contact from the police, and Davis began to feel relief. He had only helped a friend, he told himself. "My mind was trying to let me off the hook," he said.
But his dreams were less forgiving. In one, he was walking through a crowd of parents and their children. The children were looking at some writing and crying. "It was like one of those Scrooge stories," he said. He could see the children, but they could not see him. He saw their frightened faces and woke up sweating.
Davis was not entirely surprised he had ended up in Cell 3 of the Sebastian County jail. Expectations for him were so low -- at his church, at school, even in his own mind -- that he sometimes saw the line of his life pointing toward prison.
But not like this. Not with swastikas.
The jail guard had given Davis paper and envelopes, so he decided to use one to write to the mosque. He wanted to tell the people there how sorry he was for what he'd done. What, after all, did he have to lose?
He sat on the floor of the cell and placed a yellow sheet of paper on one of the metal seats bolted to the wall. He did not know the mosque's name. So he copied it, a letter at a time, from his paperwork.
"Dear Masjid Al Salam Mosque," he began.
MOSQUE'S SUPPORT
The sky was just brightening the morning of Oct. 20 when Hisham Yasin pulled into the mosque's driveway. He liked to do his morning prayers there when he could.
Rolling up to the mosque, Yasin saw the first swastika from the street, spray-painted in black on the bottom left corner of the small curbside sign. It was off-kilter, like a creeping spider.
Yasin sprang into action like a rescue worker after an earthquake. He called the police. He called the mosque's board members. He called journalists.
By early afternoon, the story was breaking.
Then something wonderful happened. The mosque's phone started ringing and didn't stop. Churches called. A synagogue called. Buddhists called. So did residents who had seen the news or simply driven by.
One man called, crying. His daughter had seen the graffiti on her way to work and told him about it. He said the vandals could not have been Christians. No true Christian would have done it.
Anas Bensalah, a mosque member who had taken the day off to help with the cleanup, told the man that he understood completely: That was exactly how he felt every time there was an attack by the Islamic State extremist group.
Over the next week, the mosque received countless cards and letters. Some people took flowers. Most of the letters were from Fort Smith and the surrounding towns, but some were from as far as Reston, Va.
Yasin was overjoyed. He kept them, as if they were jewels, in a drawer in his office.
The night the mosque was vandalized, Kristin Collins, 45, had been worrying about her white minivan. There was a knocking sound under the hood, and it sometimes lurched unexpectedly. She was afraid the transmission was going, and she could not afford to fix it.
So when Davis asked to borrow the van, she was reluctant. Collins loved her son. At 20, he was still more a teenager than a man, with a sparse goatee and -- at 5 feet 11 inches and 139 pounds -- a boyish frame. He was outgoing, loved people and liked to show off his break dancing and singing. But he was also directionless and unemployed, and spent too much time drinking and smoking pot with his friends.
Davis was himself with a small, tight group of friends, which included Craig Wigginton, a tall, intense teenager who lived in a small apartment across town. Wigginton was the friend Davis wanted to meet up with the night he asked his mother for the van. Collins let him take it. It would be four months before she learned what he'd done with it.
For all the regret and penance that the act of vandalism caused Davis, the decision to commit it took no time at all. The friends had been drinking and talking about the Islamic State, he said. Wigginton was angry about U.S. soldiers being killed, about children dying.
And then an impulse: "Let's retaliate."
Davis, Wigginton and another friend, Ezra Pedraza, got into the white van, and Davis drove to the mosque on South 28th Street. They went to the other mosque in town that night, too, and drew on it as well.
Davis burns with regret now, at their ignorance for lumping all Muslims together. "That's like meeting one racist, and you say all white guys are like him," he said. At his weakness for not stopping it: "I wish I could go back in time and say, 'Hey, dumbass, I'm the future you, and I'm telling you, don't do this.'"
DAVIS' ARREST
On the night of Feb. 17, nearly four months after the mosques were vandalized, the police went to Davis's house with a warrant for his arrest.
Davis wasn't home, but his younger brother Noah knew where he was.
"Dude, the cops came to arrest you," he said, driving to pick up Davis in the minivan so he could turn himself in. "What'd you do?"
Noah thought it was a case of mistaken identity. His brother had been in trouble twice before -- once for having marijuana paraphernalia in his backpack, once for hanging around too late on a playground -- but nothing that had required a $15,000 bond. Davis' family didn't have the money, so he waited in jail.
Later, when Davis really thought about it, he saw so many things that had brought him to this point. Too much cheap whiskey. An inescapable feeling of worthlessness. Unquestioning loyalty to his friends.
Davis had spent his entire life trying to become strong enough to protect his family, including Noah and his other younger brother, Gabriel Collins. But it was not until jail, he said, that he realized that he was the one who had inflicted the most hurt. He felt a powerful urge to set things right.
The letter to the mosque, he said, was a first step.
"I was just so tired of doing the wrong thing," he said.
It was postmarked Feb. 22.
"Dear Masjid Al Salam Mosque," Davis wrote. "I know you guys probably don't want to hear from me at all but I really want to get this to y'all. I'm so sorry about having a hand in vandalising your mosque. It was wrong and y'all did not deserve to have that done to you. I hurt y'all and I am haunted by it. And even after all this you still forgave me. You are much better people than I.
"I don't know what's going to happen to me, and that is honestly really scary. But I just wouldn't want to keep going on without trying to make amends. I wish I could undo the pain I helped to cause. I used to walk by your mosque a lot and ask myself why I would do that. I don't even hate Muslims. Or anyone for that matter.
"All in all," he concluded, "I just want to say I'm sorry."
No one had expected to hear from the vandals. Certainly not like this.
MOSQUE SEEKS MERCY
Dr. Louay Nassri, a pediatric pulmonologist who is president of Al Salam mosque, later met with a man from the prosecutor's office. He made clear that the mosque did not want to press charges and strongly opposed a felony charge for Davis.
But the prosecutors were unmoved. Sebastian County Prosecuting Attorney Daniel Shue said actions had consequences and that Davis had participated. And this was not just run-of-the-mill vandalism, it was an act of bigotry.
Davis' public defender told him that they could attack that evidence at trial. But Davis wanted to get out of jail.
He would have to plead guilty to a felony, not a mere misdemeanor. He would avoid prison, but only if he remained on good behavior for three years. Any minor violation could land him behind bars for six years. The best outcome he could hope for would be to get a judge to seal his record -- in eight years.
Around 11:15 a.m. on May 24, the day of Davis' hearing, he shuffled into Courtroom 201 through a side door in an orange jumpsuit and leg irons. Wigginton was with him. Pedraza, who had been out on bail, wore a plaid shirt and jeans.
The prosecutor noted that the victims "asked for mercy and leniency."
The judge looked out at the defendants. "Mercy. Hmmm."
He accepted their pleas. Then he lectured them.
"If the victims in this case had not approved of this, I would not have done it," he said. "You would have gone to trial, and there is a good chance all three of you would have gone to prison. So you need to think twice before you do something, which is just stupid. What you did was just stupid."
Hisham Yasin said he believes the vandalism of his mosque was one of the best things to happen to the Muslims of Fort Smith. The crime allowed them to reveal themselves -- to say, "We are your doctors, your accountants and your used-car salesmen." They now have a relationship with the synagogue in town. Several members have begun speaking to area audiences about Islam.
Yasin was reminded of a saying from the Koran.
"You might hate something that happens to you, but actually it's excellent for you," he said, sitting in his small, cluttered shop, surrounded by artifacts of his life: a revolving display of birthday key chains, a giant dried bean pod the size of an arm, an Elvis belt buckle and two plaques he got in the mail after he donated to a Sept. 11, 2001, fund. "That's what happened to us: something very bad. But very good result."
For Davis, jail became a dividing line between the mistakes of his past and some unknown future.
When Noah first saw his brother after he was released, Davis was standing alone outside the jail, holding an envelope and a Bible. Noah parked the car and jumped out without shutting his door, sprinting across the street to embrace him.
Back at home, Davis' family gathered around him in the driveway, laughing and talking. The night was warm, and the stars were out. Gabriel was ecstatic, hopping up and down.
"I'm overwhelmed," Davis said, looking at the sky.
He wanted badly to visit the mosque, to say hello and thank the people there. Nassri had asked the prosecutor to allow Davis to go but was told no. Bensalah suggested meeting Davis in a cafe, but the public defender advised against it.
After he got out of jail, Davis posted a note on Facebook.
"Well, I'm home now," he wrote. "I just want to say thank you to all those who have been supporting me and a big thanks to the guys at the mosque who have been supportive and helpful and I pray blessings over them."
The next day, he saw a response from Hisham Yasin's son.
"Bro move on with life we forgave you from the first time you apologized don't let that mistake bring you down," Wasim Yasin had written. And then, Davis' favorite line: "I speak for the whole Muslim community of fort smith we love you and want you to be the best example in life we don't hold grudges against anybody!"
It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to him.
A Section on 08/27/2017