We struggled to lift him, to get the soccer jersey on. He was heavy and stiff-limbed, and I found myself wondering if we might hurt him. They had given me gloves, but I could feel his skin through the plastic. He was very cold. He had grown a lot since I’d last seen him six years earlier, I thought. Our families weren’t especially close. I remembered him as a child, but the body in the coffin belonged to a young man. Kader and I stood still for a few seconds. The last faint hope that there might have been some kind of misunderstanding was gone.
“My God, Can, what has he done to you?” I whispered. I began to pray in Arabic. I remembered all the people I’d interviewed who had lost loved ones in wars or attacks and all the times I’d had to meet with parents who had lost their children. I remembered Anas in Iraq, and being at the family’s home a day after he was shot. I remembered how Nicholas Kulish and I had counted the bodies of dead protesters in Alexandria. But this time I wasn’t covering a story, I didn’t have that wall to protect me. In fact, I wondered if I’d ever really been able to build that wall. As Kader and I climbed the stairs to Hassan and Sibel’s apartment to tell them how their son looked, I felt the pain of all those parents coursing through me.
“How does my boy look?” Sibel asked.
I didn’t know what to say. “He looks very peaceful,” Kader finally answered. We’d been told that his parents should see him alone first, along with his brother, Ferid. We told the rest of the extended family to wait. But Sibel drove with Kader and me, and we got a little lost on the way to the funeral home. By the time we arrived, Hassan and a swarm of uncles and cousins were already inside. Sibel screamed at the sight of Can’s cousins standing over her son, kissing him good-bye. When she reached the coffin, she just stared. “Was I a bad mother, that’s why he left me so early?” she asked, touching his skin. “My beautiful son. He’s freezing.” She stroked his eyebrows, recalling that he’d always complained that he didn’t like their shape.
Watching her, I was filled with anger and guilt. Anger because it seemed we hadn’t learned much from the suffering of the past fifteen years. Guilt because it was part of my job to give people clear information that could help dispel racism and fight violence, and I, along with other journalists, had clearly failed. This shooter stood for all those people I’d come across who killed because they had created their own ideologies of hatred and, in their sick minds, a justification for taking other people’s lives.
As it turned out, David Sonboly wasn’t an Islamist; he was deeply troubled and subscribed to a more familiar ideology. It was no coincidence that the shooting had taken place on July 22, the fifth anniversary of the attack by Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing Norwegian terrorist who blew up a van in Oslo and then fatally shot sixty-nine participants at a Workers’ Youth League summer camp on a nearby island. Born on Adolf Hitler’s birthday with the name Ali (he’d changed it to David when he turned eighteen), he was a dual citizen of Germany and Iran whose parents had immigrated in the 1990s as asylum seekers. Before he became a mass killer, he was known to the police as a victim of petty crime: he’d been beaten up by other kids, and he’d been a victim of theft. Reportedly bullied at school, he was receiving psychiatric care and taking antidepressants to cope with anxiety and social phobia. In 2015, Sonboly spent two months in a hospital and subsequently attended diagnostic sessions at a youth psychiatric clinic. According to my police source, Sonboly had walked around for fifty minutes inside the McDonald’s before killing Can, Sel?uk, and the other young victims. The police believe he was targeting young, handsome “cool kids” of foreign origin, the kind of boys he’d hoped but failed to be himself.
In his room at his parents’ home in a middle-class Munich neighborhood, the police found books and news clippings on school shootings, among them a book called Rampage in the Head: Why Students Kill. Investigators also discovered photographs taken at the school in Winnenden, Germany, where seventeen-year-old Tim Kretschmer killed fifteen people in 2009 before taking his own life. Sonboly had killed his victims with a Glock pistol purchased illegally on the so-called dark web.
They said that Sonboly had struggled for years with psychological problems, but at that moment I didn’t care. He had killed Can and Sel?uk, two boys of different sects whose lives had argued powerfully against the set narrative that Sunni and Shia cannot live peacefully together.
Later, I sat alone at a table in my hotel’s rooftop restaurant, surrounded by people enjoying the sunset. Can’s killing brought back memories of terrible violence, and the scars from those old wounds began to hurt again. What happened to him had made it clearer than ever how easy it was to die before you’d led the life you hoped for. I also couldn’t help being haunted by the life Hassan and Sibel had led. They’d found each other and raised a family, but one of their children had been taken from them in this unimaginable way.
I flew to Casablanca two days later and met my parents. For the first time, we traveled together to the area where my grandfather used to have his lands, in al-Haouz and on the road to Khenifra. I also went back to my grandmother’s house in Meknes, to revisit the window where I used to sit and watch people outside. There was the corner where my grandmother and I used to sleep on a blanket. I remembered how I sat at the doorstep with my grandparents listening to my grandfather talk about his past and how much he regretted that he couldn’t read or write. Storytellers are powerful, he told me. They explain the world. They write history.
My parents and I visited my grandparents’ graves and prayed over them. I wondered what they would have said if they could have seen that their granddaughter was now reporting and writing about the world and that she was doing so because of what they had taught her. I wondered what advice they would give me now. Were the pain, the worries, the threats to my family and me worth whatever I was gaining? Was my work making a difference? I missed my grandmother’s loud laughter and her gift for healing and strengthening. I could have used some of that now.
I looked at my parents, the Sunni-Shia couple who had endured so much yet hadn’t let it divide them. They’d decided decades earlier to take a stand for their love and against the hatred. They had worked to plant the seed inside us, their children. Now I could tell they were worried about me. They knew I didn’t tell them much about what I saw and did on my journeys.