Forgiving the Unforgiveable

This article tells a powerful story about Azhim Khamisa's search for peace and understanding after the murder of his son. We use it during our forgiveness retreats....David

Azim Khamisa was looking for a killer when he first met 19-year-old Tony Hicks. He wanted to find the cold-blooded murderer who’d gunned down his son, Tariq Khamisa, a college student working as a pizza deliveryman on a fateful night in San Diego in 1995.

When Azim Khamisa met the man who, as a 14-year-old gang member, had pulled the trigger of the gun that killed his only boy, he was on the lookout for a monster. “It took a long time to develop the courage to come eyeball-to-eyeball with the person who pulled the trigger on your child,” Khamisa told a conference room full of police officers and community leaders on Feb. 3 at the Aurora police headquarters. “It took courage and a lot of meditation ... I remember looking in his eyes. I’m trying to find a murderer, and I didn’t. What I saw in him was another human being. I was able to climb through his eyes and touch his humanity.”

That meeting took place five years after Hicks had committed the crime. It happened four years after Hicks became the youngest person in California’s history to be tried and convicted as an adult for murder charges. For Azim Khamisa, visiting Hicks as he served a 25-years-to-life sentence in prison was a single step in a long journey toward forgiveness and peace. “I recognized a spark in him that was no different than the one in me, or in any one of us,” Khamisa recalled. “He murdered my son. He’d done something horrific. That did not make him inhuman. I told him, ‘Not only have I forgiven you, but when you come out, you have a job at (my) foundation,” he added, referring to the Tariq Khamisa Foundation, a nonprofit he’d founded nine months after his son’s murder as a means to break the cycle of youth violence in communities across the nation.

That spirit of forgiveness proved redemptive for Azim Khamisa, just as it did for Tony Hicks and Ples Felix, Hicks’ grandfather and legal guardian who would go on to play a major role in the nonprofit and related youth programs. It was also a key theme during Khamisa’s address to a roomful of Aurora police officers and community leaders, a small gathering that served as a substitute for an event originally planned at Aurora Central High School.

A powerful snowstorm and a spate of school cancellations on Feb. 3 moved the event to the Aurora police headquarters, but the tone behind Khamisa’s message didn’t change with the shift in venue. A follow-up to Arun Gandhi’s appearance at Central last year to commemorate the annual “Season of Nonviolence” event, Khamisa’s appearance touched on many of the tenets central in the philosophies of leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., César Chávez and Arun Gandhi’s grandfather, a man the world dubbed “Mahatma,” a Sanskrit word that meant “great soul.”

“I was very moved by (Khamisa’s) story, his commitment to changing the patterns of violence,” said Karen Paschal, the senior minister and spiritual director of the New Dawn Center for Spiritual Living. Staff from the Center worked with the Aurora police department and Aurora Public Schools to organize the second yearly celebration of the “Season of Nonviolence” event. “I felt like it would be something that people would want to hear ... Through a violent act, Azim touched the spirit that was within him and was moved to forgiveness. That is what brought him to peace.”

Following the loss of his son, Azim’s first commitment has been to youth. Since 1995, he’s addressed millions of students at thousands of appearances across the country. In addition to founding the Tariq Khamisa Foundation, he’s also worked with Ples Felix to develop the Constant And Never Ending Improvement program, a national youth advocate initiative that currently operates in seven states.

The program stress spirituality, restorative justice and literacy as an alternative to incarceration. “CANEI is about progress ... The kid who killed my son was under orders from a gang leader. We want to teach these kids that we all have an internal navigation system. If we can connect you to your spirit, what lies within you is far greater than what lies ahead of you or what lies behind you,” Khamisa said. “We do rituals, we do meditation, we do yoga ... We’d love to bring it to Aurora.

That message resonated in a small conference room packed with police officers and school resource officers on a snowy day in Aurora. Following his address to the officers and officials, Khamis fielded questions and insisted, “We are able to do this well because of our story.”

Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707
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