Maybe the child would be hers one day, so Saira Khan began preparing the house for her niece’s next visit. She sanitized the baby toys and double-checked the child safety locks. She cleaned the nursery where the girl had never been allowed to spend a night and tidied the crib that had been recovered and moved from a crime scene. It had belonged to the baby’s parents, and it was in the apartment where they had left her one morning last December before driving to an office party in San Bernardino, armed with pipe bombs, handguns and AR-15s.
Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik had killed 14 people that day and injured more than 20 others before dying in a shootout with police. They had also orphaned their own 6-month-old daughter. Now that baby had become a toddler who was just beginning to walk, and she was still living in foster care under the official custody of San Bernardino County. Saira, who was Farook’s older sister, had spent 11 months trying to adopt her niece, but so far the county would only agree to grant her regular, six-hour visits.
“Do we have her alone this time, or is someone coming to check on us?” asked Farhan Khan, Saira’s husband.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“More questions? More investigators?”
“Probably,” she said.
They had spent the past year trying to make sense of a shooting in which there were still so many unanswered questions, and lately the one that consumed them most was what would happen to the baby. They were her closest surviving relatives. Maybe caring for their niece, Saira thought, would restore some small bit of order not only to the baby’s life, but also to their own.
So Saira, 32, and Farhan, 42, had gone to court and filed for adoption. They had submitted to regular background checks and home inspections. They had been interviewed several times by Child Protective Services and cleared by the FBI of having any prior knowledge of the shooting. Now the only thing left to do was to wait for a custody decision that was based on the county’s discretion, even though the county had not indicated when a decision might come. “We are normal people. We are a good family,” Saira had tried to impress upon one CPS representative after the next, and each of her niece’s visits was an opportunity to prove it.
She cleaned the crumbs left on the living room carpet by her 3-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son. She straightened the wall art hanging in the kitchen that read: “In this house, we do second chances. We do grace. We do forgiveness. We do hugs.”
Their three-bedroom house was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a suburb of Riverside, with a lemon tree in the back yard and a view of the La Sierra Hills. Farhan worked in printer sales, managing a team of 12 employees. Saira was finishing her master’s degree in education. They had two children, a hybrid car and a vacation timeshare in San Diego — a nice California life until the day their cul-de-sac had jammed with police cars and television broadcasters, some of whom had mistakenly identified Saira and Farhan as the perpetrators of what was then considered the deadliest act of terrorism in the United States since 9/11.
The shooting had upended so many American families, including theirs. Saira said that her mother was taking sleeping pills to get through the night, and her father was escaping into delusions and becoming harder to understand. Meanwhile, Saira and Farhan were somehow trying to hold everything together, apologizing to the nation at a news conference, reaching out to families of victims, sinking some of their savings into adoption proceedings and returning at the end of each night to the same verse in the Koran: “God is with those who patiently persevere,” it read.
Now Saira walked into the small room in their house that she had set aside for her niece, a nursery wallpapered in blue and pink. She straightened the children’s books on the shelf. She set out some of her niece’s favorite toys and then opened her closet.
The clothing rack was filled with dozens of outfits that had been recovered from Farook and Malik’s apartment. Most of them were frilly dresses with the tags still attached, ranging in size from 9 months to 6 years. The couple had kept the clothes hidden in a suitcase, which the FBI had found in the closet of their apartment. At the same time that Farook and Malik had been stockpiling thousands of rounds of ammunition, they had also been assembling a future wardrobe for the child they did not plan to raise.
“Does any of this fit yet?” Farhan asked. He had followed Saira into the bedroom, but she didn’t seem to hear him. She was sifting through the dresses and looking at the tags.
“Age four. Two. Three. Six,” she said, reading the sizes. “What kind of parent makes plans to abandon their child? How were they capable of something like that and we didn’t know?”
* * *
It was the question so many people had been asking ever since the shooting, and over time it had come to sound to Saira more like an accusation or an even an indictment: How could they not have known?
They had heard it in those first days from the FBI; and from friends at the mosque where Saira now sometimes felt isolated at Friday night prayers; and from parents in the drop-off line at their children’s elementary school; and from a cousin in Chicago before he hung up and told them not to call again; and from so many strangers at grocery stores or restaurants that, for the first time in her life, Saira had begun traveling with one can of Mace in her car and another in her purse.
Worst of all, it was the same question they had also been asking themselves. Should they somehow have known? Did they miss out on clues? When Farook started becoming increasingly conservative in his beliefs a decade before the shooting, eating only halal foods and saying he didn’t believe in birthday parties, should that have somehow been a cause for alarm? Or when he left their wedding celebration early in 2007 because he thought it was sinful to dance or listen to music, did that mean he was becoming a radical Islamist? And when he started to complain vaguely about his office’s annual Christmas party, should Saira somehow have concluded that her quietest, most gentle sibling — a man with no criminal record and no history of violence — was planning an attack?
They had not grown up in a particularly religious home. Their father, a truck driver who sometimes struggled to find stable work, rarely visited a mosque. Their mother had worked as a secretary and supported the family through moves to Pakistan, Illinois and California. Saira was the oldest of four, and she had always considered Farook the most easygoing of her siblings — shy, dependable, always happy to babysit her children or change the oil in her car. Not until he went to college did he begin growing out his beard, talking often about traditional Islamic law and searching online for a Muslim wife. He told the rest of the family that he wasn’t looking for a beautiful woman, only a devout one. After he met Malik online, he dissuaded his family from traveling to Saudi Arabia for their wedding in 2014.
Saira and Farhan hadn’t gone, so they met Malik for the first time when she moved back with Farook to Riverside. She wore a full veil, and she rarely spoke. Whenever Saira and Farhan invited the newlywed couple to their house, Malik would sequester herself away from the men in one of the bedrooms, locking the door for privacy. Farook said it was for religious reasons, but Saira thought it was excessive and rude.
“Doesn’t it seem like weird behavior?” she remembered saying to Farhan once.
“Don’t worry about it,” he told her, because he thought there were so many possible explanations. Malik didn’t speak very much English. She was shy. She was new to the United States. She and Farook were newly married and wanted their privacy. “It will get better,” Farhan said.
And then Malik became pregnant a few months into the marriage and had the baby, and in some ways things did get better. She texted Saira for advice on breast-feeding and infant sleep cycles. She started coming out of her room with the baby and visiting more freely. When she said that she needed more rest and asked Saira to babysit, there was never any reason for Saira to wonder whether in fact maybe Malik was going to a shooting range. When she asked Saira, who at the time was nursing her own daughter, to occasionally also breast-feed her niece, Saira agreed and regarded it as an honor. She never considered that perhaps it was because Malik was preparing the child to form an attachment with someone else.
So, on Dec. 2, when Saira heard about a shooting in San Bernardino, she turned on the TV news without ever beginning to consider that her brother might be involved. That was not in her mind when her mother called to say Farook and Malik had left the baby with her because of a doctor’s appointment. Not when her mother called back a few hours later to say the couple was still gone and the baby was getting hungry. Not when her calls to Farook or Malik went directly to voice mail. Not when the TV news reported that the attack had begun at an office Christmas party. Not even when her own cellphone began to ring over and over — until finally she answered one of the calls, from a journalist in New York.
“Did you know about this?” Saira was asked, for the first time.
By then the FBI had already arrived at Farook and Malik’s apartment, where agents found Saira’s mother and her hungry niece. It had been six hours since the last time the baby ate. She had never been away from her parents for more than a few hours, and she had never been fed from a bottle. She was crying as agents put her into a separate car, taking her first to an FBI office and then to San Bernardino CPS. Saira had tried to find her niece so that she could breast-feed her, but nobody would tell her where the baby was, so for the next several weeks Saira had sometimes heard the sound of a hungry baby crying in her sleep.
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SOURCE: Eli Saslow
The Washington Post
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