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  For the millions in history imprisoned unjustly.

  For those who fight for the helpless.

  For Aunty, Uncle, Yusuf, and Tanveer, who lived this nightmare alone for seventeen years.

  For Adnan, who gives us all the hope we need to fight for him, however long it may take.

  For Hae.

  Bismillah.

  INTRODUCTION

  Malik reported: Amir Az-Zubair would stop speaking whenever he heard thunder and he would say, “Glory to Him who said: The thunder exalts His praise as well as the angels from fear of Him,” (Quran 13:13). Then Amir would say, “This is a strong warning to the people of the earth.”

  Imam Malik, “Muwatta,” 8th century B.C.E.

  When Adnan was convicted, it thundered three times. The day was bright and sunny, but as we sat there clutching our hands while the foreman pronounced the verdicts, it thundered.

  February 25, 2000, was a Friday, which was a good sign. Fridays are auspicious for Muslims. It is a blessed day, our day of sermons and congregational prayer, the day we start all new things with a “bism`illah,” invoking the name of God.

  I sat with Adnan’s mother, Aunty Shamim, while other members of the community were scattered behind us. Aunty looked straight ahead stoically, a scarf draped over her head, sitting shoulder to shoulder with her oldest son. I prayed silently as the jury was brought in. On the other side of the wooden railing, Adnan stood with his lawyer. Tall and skinny, facial hair coming in sparsely over his pale face, he was barely entering manhood.

  The foreman rose.

  On the first count, murder in the first degree: guilty. It thundered and we all turned our heads, looking out the courtroom windows at the clear skies, stunned.

  On the second count, kidnapping by fraud: guilty. Then it thundered a second time and we again turned our faces, scanning the sunny outdoors, confused.

  On the third count, robbery: guilty. It thundered again. This time I only glanced outside, keeping my face turned toward Adnan’s slight figure, paralyzed. By the time the fourth count was read, false imprisonment, I had tuned out, my ears filled with the rush of blood.

  Closing arguments had been made only a few hours earlier; we had just begun contemplating where to eat lunch when we were called back to the courthouse. A verdict had been reached. A fast and hard verdict. The weekend loomed ahead after all.

  The bailiff approached Adnan and closed cuffs around his wrists and ankles, the same ones he had worn shuffling in and out of court day after day. There were audible gasps and sobs, some escaping me as I rocked back and forth in my seat, repeating “no, no, no…” This was not actually happening. We were told this was not going to happen.

  Then Adnan turned to us—his mother, his brother, his friends, his community—and said, “It’s ok. I didn’t do it. Allah knows I didn’t do it.”

  * * *

  Adnan Syed was seventeen when he was arrested for the murder of his former girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999 in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland. He was convicted and sentenced to life plus thirty years. My younger brother Saad’s best friend, Adnan is like a brother to me, and for seventeen years now my family and I have stood by him as he has maintained his innocence.

  I was in law school when Adnan was arrested and still a student when he was convicted. I was never Adnan’s lawyer. But my life has remained tethered to Adnan through an abiding belief that he is innocent.

  In 2013, after exhausting almost all appeals, I contacted Sarah Koenig, a producer at This American Life. Her subsequent investigation turned into the podcast Serial, an international phenomenon and the most successful podcast ever produced.

  Serial told a riveting who-done-it tale in such a masterful way that some people did not realize it was a true story even after the twelve episodes ended. The story it told was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth, or the whole story.

  The success of the podcast was understandable, if not completely expected. This is a story constructed of dozens and dozens of layers, an array of odd characters, malfeasance and misjudgments, and the aligning of all that can go wrong, and must go wrong, to convict an innocent person. But the real allure of Serial was the man at the center of the story, Adnan. Listeners were left wondering, week after week, about who he really was.

  Serial presented two options. Adnan was either an innocent, wrongfully convicted young man who had suffered a great travesty of justice. Or he was a cold-blooded psychopathic murderer, driven by either jealousy or brutal religious beliefs, who had managed to manipulate his loved ones into believing his innocence for fifteen years.

  This book will tell the stories Serial didn’t and address issues of justice, bigotry, faith, community, devastation, healing, and hope from the point of view of Adnan and those who support him. I am here to tell Adnan’s story as, after so many years of living it and studying it, I see it. But more importantly, to give Adnan his own voice back. Throughout the book, Adnan’s own contributions will do just that.

  CHAPTER 1

  STAR-CROSSED LOVERS

  We decreed on the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul,

  unless for another killing or for spreading corruption in the land,

  it is as if he had slain mankind entirely.

  And whoever saves one—it is as if he had saved mankind entirely.

  Holy Quran 5:32

  Leakin Park is beautiful and quiet. Heavily wooded, yet nestled amid densely populated urban neighborhoods in West Baltimore, its three hundred acres adjoin Gwynn Oak Park seamlessly, forming over a thousand acres of nature in the middle of a city not known for outdoor beauty. Other than a hushed flow of water, its peace is disturbed only by cars passing through on Franklintown Road.

  To horror film aficionados Leakin Park should look familiar—the sequel to the cult classic Blair Witch Project was partially filmed there. It may have been the park’s reputation that drew the filmmakers to it. Leakin Park is a notorious dumping ground for bodies. The remains of at least sixty-eight murdered people have been found there in the past five decades, most recently in November 2012.

  You wouldn’t know to look at it, though.

  In summertime the brambles, vines, and thorny creepers are in abundance, making it difficult to forge a path from where we enter the park back to the Dead Run Stream. The stream is low and gentle this day, but has the potential to surge up forcefully. A century ago it powered grist, cloth, and paper mills, joined by its sister stream, Gwynn Falls, both of which eventually drop eastward into the Patapsco River and then the Chesapeake Bay.

  Today Dead Run Stream babbles softly over a rocky bed, cutting through the park’s ravine, nearly parallel to the road roughly a hundred yards south of it.

  On this sweltering summer day I’m trying to figure something out about Leakin Park. As I head inside on no discernible path, fighting through brambles, I’m followed closely by a soil expert from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who hauls a sh
ovel and had the forethought to keep high rubber boots in her car. I have asked for her help in determining the terrain type. My younger daughter is with us. At six years old, the idea of the woods is more appealing to her than the reality, and after encountering a few prickly brushes she refuses to go on. I pick her up and try to shelter her from the reaching, spiky foliage as we move under the shade of red oaks and American beeches.

  It is cooler inside the park than a few dozen yards away on the road, which is in the sun. But the stillness of the park belies the tangible humidity seeping through our clothing, filling the air and the gaps between us.

  Beyond the brambles, a rough path about a foot across becomes noticeable as we approach a fallen tree to our right. The tree is about forty feet long and parallel to the stream. In previous visits I witnessed at least half a dozen “tourists” stomp back to the tree to have their picture taken with it.

  But it’s the wrong tree.

  I turn to the left and begin following the stream westward.

  We go up a slight incline and there I set my daughter down. She’s still frightened, grasping my legs. A mound rises up to my left, covering God knows what, with a filthy, nearly unrecognizable piece of carpet on top of it. The last time I was here the carpet lay flat. Now it’s been pushed to one side, perhaps more “tourists” trying to figure out what’s underneath.

  I point to a spot a few feet behind it, at a massive fallen tree, unmoved for decades. Its roots spread in the air, claw-like, nearly reaching the stream. Large rocks and manmade concrete chunks lie scattered, and pieces of a corroded metal frame poke out from the ground.

  From here, the road seems distant. We are shielded from view.

  Under the very center of the tree is a hollow in the earth. It dips from one side of the tree to the other, like a cozy bowl perfectly formed, nearly four feet across. A shallow bed of soft dirt, leaves, and moss.

  I wipe the sweat from my face, pushing back the hair that escaped my scarf, and nod toward it.

  “That’s it. That’s where Hae’s body was found.”

  * * *

  Woodlawn High School in Woodlawn, Maryland, is in western Baltimore County, not the city of Baltimore. But the distance to the city, where the murder rate in 1999 was nearly a homicide a day, is just a few miles. Established in the 1920s, Woodlawn High is now one of the largest public schools in the county, and one of the most diverse.

  It has also been prone to violence. Shootings, stabbings, and murder were not unusual in Woodlawn. And though the high school boasts a robust Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) magnet program, a police presence at and around the school has not been uncommon.

  On January 7, 1999, a fifteen-year-old was stabbed repeatedly by another student in the stairwell of the school, the culmination of a long-standing grudge. He was rushed to the hospital where he was treated and survived. The other student was arrested, and the rest of the school went about its day. That was Woodlawn.

  While the majority of the student population is and has always been African American, the establishment of a mosque, the Islamic Society of Baltimore, in its vicinity has meant a growing number of local Muslim families and Muslim students at Woodlawn. The mosque eventually became surrounded by neighborhoods with dozens of South Asian Muslim families, including Syed Rahman’s.

  Rahman and his wife and three sons lived a brisk fifteen-minute walk from the mosque. He was a state employee, and his wife, Shamim, ran a home-based daycare center in the basement of their modest two-level home. They had emigrated from Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where ethnic Pashtuns constitute the majority. Rahman and Shamim were Pashtun; their sons, Tanveer, Adnan, and Yusuf, were born in the United States.

  The Rahmans were devout and simple people, raising their sons to be involved at the mosque, without television and other external influences at home. To Western sensibilities they might be considered “fundamentalists.” To us, they were just conservative but kindly people.

  The neighborhood they lived in was part of a modest subdivision peppered with Muslim families, a subdivision my own parents moved to in 1997. Like other Pakistanis and Muslims in the area, the Rahmans became acquaintances we ran into every so often, and as is traditional South Asian custom, my siblings and I called them “Uncle” and “Aunty” out of affection and respect.

  My parents first moved to the Baltimore area in 1994 to the mostly white suburb of Ellicott City but moved closer to the mosque, and the city, in 1997. I had gotten married in 1996 while still in college and moved to northern Virginia, and my younger sister, Siddrah, was attending the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) and living on campus. Our younger brother, Saad, was still in high school and living at home. The move meant Saad would have to switch from the very safe, suburban high school he attended, Mount Hebron, to Woodlawn High. But my mother worried about the school’s reputation for drugs and violence, and managed to find a way to keep Saad in the Ellicott City school.

  Although Saad never attended Woodlawn High, he got to know many of the local Muslim kids who did through the mosque, where they gathered almost every evening to play basketball. This is how he met Adnan Syed, the Rahman’s middle son, and how our family came to know Adnan as Saad’s best friend—a gangly, bespectacled kid who most of us thought was too sweet to be my alpha male, sports-jock brother’s friend.

  In January of 1999 I was in my second year of law school at the George Mason School of Law in Virginia, where I lived with my two-year-old daughter, husband, and nearly a dozen in-laws from Pakistan. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, but shortly after my wedding I was told that we would be living in a traditional joint-family system. Mine was no ordinary, set-up-by-the-parents Pakistani marriage. I had met, fallen in love with, and married a student from Pakistan completely on my own. It had taken three years to convince my parents, my mother in particular, to let the marriage take place. After that, I was in no position to complain to my family that I was now badly stuck living with his parents, two grown brothers, their wives, the child of one of them, and a younger sister, all in the same house. Badly stuck not only because I had fought for this relationship in the face of my own family’s resistance but also because within two weeks of marriage it was clear that my new marriage was deeply troubled.

  My in-laws set the terms of my life. I could attend law school as long as I took care of my family responsibilities, which meant it was my job to cook for the entire extended family twice a day. I had to attend law school in the evenings.

  My weeks were exhausting. I woke in the morning, bathed and fed my little girl, made a curry or some such thing for the family’s lunch, and ran to my internship at a local law firm from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Then I returned home, spent a couple of hours with my daughter, made dinner, and left for law school by five o’clock. I often returned home around eleven and spent the night hours, after the house had fallen quiet, doing my homework. Most nights I fell asleep around 3:00 a.m. Then I was back up at seven o’clock to start the day over.

  By Friday I was in desperate need of respite, and what saved me was being able to come home to my parents in Baltimore every weekend. I told them nothing of my home life, but showed up every Friday night with my daughter in tow and stayed until Sunday evening. Those two days of peace every week kept me sane and got me through the toughest years of my life. And it was during those visits that I first learned that a young local girl, a student at Woodlawn High School named Hae Min Lee, was missing.

  * * *

  Wednesday, January 13, 1999, was a rather mild day for winter in Baltimore, with temperatures reaching into the fifties, though in the weeks prior a number of snowstorms had hit the area.

  That year eighteen-year-old Hae Min Lee was a senior at Woodlawn High. A star student-athlete, she played both lacrosse and field hockey, managed the boy’s wrestling team, worked part-time at LensCrafters, and maintained excellent grades, with a 3.8 GPA as part
of the school’s Magnet Program. The students in the program were close. Adnan, Krista Meyers, Debbie Warren, Rebecca (Becky) Walker, Stephanie McPherson, Laura Estrada, Hae’s best friend Aisha Pittman, and a few others hung out constantly. By all accounts Hae was a popular, hard-working, independent young woman. Her diary reveals an impassioned teenager focused on her studies and intense romantic love.

  Hae was born in South Korea and migrated with her mother and brother to the United States when she was in middle school. She lived in the Woodlawn area with her mother, grandparents, young brother, and two cousins. There were rumors of a stepfather (or ex-fiancé) in California, where Hae, her brother, and mother spent a few months during her sophomore year. There were also conflicting stories about her biological father, who may or may not have ever been in the United States.

  That Wednesday morning, January 13, 1999, Hae left home for school around 7:00 a.m. Her grandmother saw her get into her gray Nissan Sentra and drive away, not knowing it would be the last time she would see her granddaughter alive.

  Classes started early at Woodlawn, at 7:45 a.m., and students began arriving by 7:30. According to school records and classmate accounts, Hae came to school on time that day. She was the teacher’s assistant in her first-period French class. The rest of her day, though, is hard to piece together—inexplicably, statements weren’t taken from students and teachers until long after she disappeared.

  What is certain is that Hae left school sometime after dismissal at 2:15 p.m. It was her responsibility to pick up her six-year-old cousin from Campfield Early Learning Center, less than four miles away, by 3:15 p.m. every day. But that day her cousin was left stranded.

  According to trial testimony, Hae’s younger brother, Young Lee, received a phone call from Campfield around 3:30 p.m., asking that someone come to pick up the girl. Young called his grandfather to go retrieve his cousin, then called Hae’s workplace and best friend, Aisha Pittman, looking for her. When he was unable to find her, he told their mother that Hae had not made it to Campfield and was missing. After two hours the family called the police, panicked.