Project Diary: what would you say to the killer?

Logo of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence

No one was ever arrested in the killing of Marilyn’s son Khadafy back in 2000. She hungers for justice and much of the motivation for her work supporting families in the immediate aftermath of homicides in Oakland has been to keep Khadafy’s name out there, to keep the pressure on.

Sometimes she says the delay is part of God’s plan, that if there had been timely justice, if someone had been arrested, tried and sentenced, she might not have extended her ministry all these twenty-five years. I wonder.

There have been times when she talked about a hunger she had to speak to her son’s killer. I think that hunger is universal among survivors. Recently, I asked Marilyn what she would say if she could talk to him.

“I would be lying if I told you I know,” she told me. “I had an idea of what I might want to say but that doesn’t mean I would have said that. Of course my first question would have been Why. Why did you do it? What made you do it? And what was his last words, and I think those are probably some of the questions that all people’s loved ones want to know. Why did you do it? What did they say, what was their last words? That’s the only thing I would have been able to come up with. It wouldn’t have made me happy anyway, but I wanted to know those things.“