Letter from Rochester

The Survivors

Nader Hasan and Kerry Cahill might never have met except for an unspeakable tragedy: on November 5, 2009, in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, his cousin—Army major Nidal Malik Hasan—killed her father. Now they are bound by a joint mission: to reclaim some good from their shared horror.

by Lee Hancock

June 2012

Kerry Cahill paced the floor of a classroom at Nazareth College of Rochester, in New York, explaining to the group of fidgety teenagers in blue Rochester Global Citizenship Conference T-shirts why she and her companion, Nader Hasan, were there. They’d come, she said, to offer their perspective on the terrible tragedies that can happen when people become too isolated and misguided. Nader, a compact 42-year-old with thinning hair and sad gray eyes, leaned against the teacher’s desk as if weighted down. He asked the kids if they knew what had happened at Fort Hood. He got a chorus of bland yeses.

“That was my cousin who did that,” he said. His voice grew so quiet that the students had to strain to hear him finish. “My cousin killed Kerry’s father.”

Seventy heads swiveled toward Kerry, a willowy six-foot blonde dressed in gray and black. She nodded with her eyes squeezed shut, as if to say, “Yes, really.”

It had been two and a half years since her father died, and she still sometimes could not believe it. She had spent months preparing for this moment in mid-March, trading emails and texts with Nader and talking on the phone for hours. The two had been invited to speak at a high school conference on religious tolerance, 1,600 miles from the spot where their lives became horrifically intertwined on November 5, 2009. They had come hoping to reclaim some good from the terror of that day.

Kerry showed photos of her dad, Michael Cahill, a big guy with a white beard who looked like Santa Claus. A 29-year-old actress who lives in New Orleans, she grew up the youngest of three military brats. Her father, she explained, had worked at Fort Hood as a civilian physician’s assistant for seven years. He was known to everyone as Doc Cahill and had a reputation for getting soldiers whatever they needed—a correct diagnosis, meds, a pass on redeploying—even if he had to fight for it.

The day Michael died, he had been back at work for a week after recovering from a heart attack. The deadliest shooting ever on an American military base began when U.S. Army major and psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan—whose sparse hair and high forehead vaguely resemble Nader’s—tucked a semiautomatic pistol into his combat uniform, along with sixteen extra magazines and a backup revolver, and drove from his grungy Killeen apartment to Fort Hood. He made his way to the Soldier Readiness Processing Center, where medical personnel were assessing hundreds of deploying soldiers. Once inside, Nidal screamed, “Allahu Akbar!” and began shooting into the crowd. Within ten minutes, 32 people were wounded and 13 more lay dead. Nidal kept firing until an exchange of bullets with two police officers left him paralyzed below the chest.

Kerry was in Chicago at the time and watched the news unspool at the home of a friend who happened to have lost his partner during 9/11. She tried calling her father but got no response. She began dialing every Texas hospital reported to be treating Fort Hood victims but found out nothing. The longer her family went without hearing from him, the more she hoped her dad was unreachable because he was in an ambulance or on an operating table. She kept thinking about how she and her mother, Joleen, had asked him if he really felt ready to go back to work.

At 11:15 that evening, an Army sergeant and a chaplain arrived at Joleen’s door, in Cameron. Michael Cahill, they reported, was the only civilian killed at Fort Hood that day. Witnesses would later recall him trying, amid the bap-bap-bap of gunfire, to protect soldiers by grabbing a chair and rushing Nidal. It took six gunshots to fell him. When Kerry received the news from her sister, she beat her fist on her friend’s kitchen table and wailed.

One time zone away, Nader, a successful lawyer in Washington, D.C., was leaving a golf course when he got a call saying that his first cousin had been wounded in a shooting at Fort Hood. The son of Palestinian immigrants, Nader had grown up with Nidal in the suburbs of the nation’s capital. As he pecked out a quick email on his phone to thirty classmates in a local civic leadership program, explaining why he would miss their gathering that night, Nader wondered what kind of kook would open fire at a military base. He sped to his mother’s home, a block away from his own. As he parked, his phone buzzed with a friend’s worried message: Had he watched the news?

Inside, Nader’s mother, Nawal, was weeping. A talking head on TV was reporting that the gunman, who had trained as a terrorist in Syria, was none other than his cousin. Nader’s thoughts pinballed: Nidal? His sweet-faced childhood playmate? The one who wouldn’t take a swing when Nader and his brother brawled? The one who never dated because his parents didn’t approve, who butchered what Arabic he tried to speak, who hadn’t ever been near Syria?

Just that morning, Nader had celebrated the launch of a wounded-warrior support website he’d helped set up for his dearest friend, a Marine who was recovering from being shot in the head by a sniper in Iraq. Now the incongruity was too much. “I have a major hero, my best friend,” Nader told me later, “and a major horror, my cousin.”

Nearly a year after the attack, in October 2010, Nawal would travel alone to Texas to hear for herself what her nephew had done. During the second week of Nidal’s Article 32 hearing to determine whether the evidence against him merited a full trial, Nawal entered the cramped military courtroom, dressed in a dark suit and carrying a shopping bag filled with home-cooked Middle Eastern food for her nephew. She looked stricken when he was rolled into the room in a wheelchair.

Sitting across the aisle from her was Joleen. As she struggled to understand what had motivated the man who killed her husband of 37 years, the widow also found herself wondering who the dignified Palestinian woman was. Nawal stared at Nidal’s blank face with as much horror and disbelief as any relative of the wounded or the dead. As soldier after soldier took the witness stand to describe the bloodbath, she appeared to fight back tears.

Nawal kept her silence until the last day. “We want everyone to know,” she told me in the hallway, her whisper edged with exhaustion, “we had no idea.”

Nader and Nidal Hasan, the oldest sons of two Palestinian brothers, grew up practically as siblings. Nader’s parents immigrated to Washington, D.C., in the early sixties and then helped Nidal’s parents follow. The families lived just blocks away from each other, and the two boys were a year apart in age. Nader still remembers playing hide-and-seek with Nidal among women’s clothing racks every weekend as their mothers shopped at the mall.

The family ties began to loosen, however, when Nader’s parents divorced when he was in the fourth grade. Nader, his brother, and his three sisters were raised by Nawal, who worked her way up from a mailroom job to the post of vice president at a Wachovia bank. She loved her adopted country and told her kids that there was no conflict between being a good Muslim and a good American. Nader played football, joined the wrestling team, and got an earring and a mohawk. Though he helped Nidal get his first job, at Pizza Hut, the cousins grew further apart when Nidal’s family moved to Roanoke to run several convenience stores and a diner. Nidal lived at home while pursuing a biochemistry degree at Virginia Tech, clerking at the family stores when not in class. He joined the Army to pay tuition and then went to military medical school, while Nader ended up studying law at the University of Illinois.

Neither young man was particularly devout; though their parents fasted during Ramadan, they were too busy working to be mosque regulars. When Nidal’s father died, in 1998, his son could not recite the Islamic prayers at the funeral. But in 2001, as Nidal’s mother lay dying of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she begged him to get to know God, and he began attending mosque. After her death, the family saw his interest in religion as a natural part of grieving. Nawal herself had become more devout after losing her sister, even making a pilgrimage to Mecca, and she encouraged her nephew when he spoke of reading the Koran.

A few months after Nidal’s mother’s funeral, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. Reeling along with everyone else, Nidal adamantly told his family that the hijackers were burning in hell. Nader, for his part, found himself representing Muslim clients who were being questioned by terrorism investigators after the attacks. Because of his connections—he had tended bar at a swanky Republican hangout in the nineties—he was asked by a member of George W. Bush’s press team to guide members of the media at Yankee Stadium when the president made an appearance at the World Series, as a way of showing American Muslim support. He also volunteered at several presidential events in Washington and attended a Christmas party at the White House that year.

It wasn’t until 2006 that Nidal began telling relatives that he wanted out of the Army because he didn’t want to fight Muslims. He also spoke of being disrespected because of his faith. “My retort was, ‘What do you expect?’ ” Nader recalled. “The family agreed it came with the territory.” Their biggest worry was that Nidal had no real friends or pastimes. By mid-2009, he kept so much to himself that nobody on Nader’s side of the family knew that he’d been promoted to major. That October, when Nidal got the orders he’d dreaded—for deployment to Afghanistan—he didn’t tell anyone back home.

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