His brother was gunned down days after 9/11. Why he forgave the killer

His brother Balbir had been shot and killed while planting flowers outside of his Mesa gas station, making him the first victim in what would become a wave of assaults by white supremacists looking to kill Muslims and Arabs in revenge for the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Less than a year after Balbir’s death, Rana’s brother Sukhpal was killed driving a taxi in San Francisco.

Rana’s depression was so deep that he couldn’t shake it until his brothers came to him in a dream.

“Some people believe," Rana said. "Some don’t.”

“They gave me a message: They said they are so happy where they are, and I need to be happy, too.”

Rana woke up, rattled. What just happened? What did it mean? Was it real?

“It’s a dream,” he said. “But I get the message.”

And eventually, Rana did find happiness again. He discovered it on the other side of forgiveness.

'This country will give you life'

Rana Singh Sodhi’s life changed forever the day Balbir was killed, Sept. 15, 2001.

“It’s very painful to lose your loved one,” Rana said, “but I learned love. I’ve received so much love.”

He spoke to The Arizona Republic at his Mesa home in August, wearing a turban in keeping with his Sikh faith.

Rana could have stopped wearing his turbans, a choice police say his brother Sukhpal had made before his death Aug. 4, 2002.

Police have said Sukhpal was killed by a stray bullet in a rough neighborhood.

Rana has never been able to accept that version. He thinks it was a hate crime. About a week before Sukhpal’s death another Sikh cabbie had been pulled out of his vehicle and beaten in the street in the same gang- and drug-infested neighborhood.

Rana knows he’ll probably never have a definite answer.

He took a deep breath as he sat in his living room on cabriole sofas, near a polished baby grand piano, an imperial staircase and an authentic Hopi kachina.

Across the room were framed photos of Rana shaking hands with Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. (Rana was a fan of Ronald Reagan, but they never met. He did speak to George W. Bush on the phone once.)

Rana says his story could only happen in America, and the calm conviction in his eyes erases the irony that the man who killed Balbir told arresting police, “I’m a patriot! … I stand for America!”

“If you’re smart, if you’re hardworking,” Rana said, “this country will give you life.”

The life America gave Rana Singh Sodhi is nothing like the life he could have imagined growing up in the 1960s and ’70s in rural India.

The only similarity between the life Rana lives and the life he imagined is the reality that in each nation, Rana and other Sikhs were marked for death by people who couldn’t see past their turbans and beards.

Leaving one home for a new one

Rana Singh Sodhi grew up as the youngest of 11 siblings in the Punjab state of northwestern India.

“We lived in a small village,” Rana said. “Dirt roads … we grow our own wheat, rice, sugarcane, all vegetables.”

The Sodhi family was part of a small-but-visible religious minority, known for their headwraps, long hair and communal lifestyles. Sikhism rejects all social-class distinctions, including India’s caste system, and adherents are taught to care for one another.

“It’s simple,” Rana said, “but very peaceful and very happy.”

That was until Oct. 31, 1984, when anti-Sikh mob violence led to thousands of deaths emanating from New Delhi, the nation’s capital.

Then, as now, the Sikh were surrounded and outnumbered by Hindus and Muslims, except in the state of Punjab, where their faith started about 500 years ago.

Today, Sikhs make up about 2% of India’s nearly 1.5 billion people. The world’s most-populous nation is about 80% Hindu and 14% Muslim.

All of this is important context to understand why Rana and his brothers, along with tens of thousands of other Indian Sikhs, ended up in the U.S. in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Sikhs as a whole were blamed when India’s prime minister was assassinated by two of her bodyguards, who were Sikh. The men were said to be acting in retaliation for an India army raid looking for armed separatists in the Sikh’s most sacred temple.

All hell broke loose.

Thousands of Sikh civilians in New Delhi and elsewhere were attacked, clubbed to death, gang raped or burned alive.

From Oct. 31 to Nov. 3, 1984, between 3,000 and 17,000 Sikhs were killed by mobs of Hindu thugs. (The government says 3,000; advocacy groups say the actual number is 5.6 times higher.)

Advocates have blamed India’s government for supporting the attacks, saying justice and reparation are long overdue.

After the massacre, India police, mostly Hindu, stepped up their presence in Punjab, the only place in the world where Sikhs are a majority, and waves of people fearing oppression and occupation left for Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.

By 1987, Rana had landed with his family in Southern California as more and more siblings and cousins came over to help get the family established.

They started a restaurant in Palm Springs. They opened a few gas stations. And they spread out. Some went to the San Francisco Bay Area; others to Arizona.

In 1989, Rana headed to Phoenix and never looked back.

“We came here with zero money,” Rana said. “We worked and saved. Three brothers (and their wives) lived almost 10 years together in one house. We used three cars for all six people to drive around.”

They built up their lives, slowly and steadily, one restaurant, one gas station at a time.

And they mostly kept to themselves.

Sikhs, unlike other religious traditions, don’t evangelize. Their faith calls for them to live and let live.

And this is the sort of life Rana was settling into, until terrorists hijacked airplanes to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In a matter of days, the shock waves from attacks would hit Phoenix and the Sodhi family.

The morning the world changed

It’s hard to explain it to people who weren’t around on Sept. 11, 2001.

It was a different world 25 years ago.

No social media. No smartphones. No streaming services.

Back then, people watched TV and called each other on landline telephones. News shows represented a collective consciousness for which there’s no modern-day equivalent.

So, when hijacked airliners crashed into the Twin Towers first thing that Tuesday morning, it seemed like the entire nation saw it at once in real time.

“Balbir called me and told me, ‘Turn on the TV because our country (is getting) attacked,’” Rana said, according to a 2016 NPR story, “’People Saw Only a Turban and a Beard.’”

Did you notice that? Balbir said, “Our country.”

About 3,000 people died on Sept. 11.

The United States hadn’t seen anything like it since Pearl Harbor, 60 years earlier.

Back in 1941, information took time to spread across daily papers and biweekly newsreels.

In 2001, the attacks were blasted unfiltered directly into every living room in the nation. It was impossible to escape.

Disaffected Americans like Frank Roque were radicalized, instantly.

“Sept. 11 opened a spigot for hate and bigotry in the United States,” Tony Kireopoulos, a religious diversity advocate, told The Associated Press in 2021.

That story, under the headline “U.S. faith leaders recall Sikh’s bias killing post Sept. 11,” cited FBI data that showed a 1,600 percent increase in hate crimes against Muslims from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001. (There was no separate category for Sikhs until about 15 years later.)

Rana and Balbir knew there would be trouble. They started getting harassed around Phoenix on Sept. 12, hearing from random strangers “---- you!” and “Go back to your country!”

That Saturday, Sept. 15, Balbir became the first of at least three and as many as seven people killed in immediate anti-Muslim and Arab backlash, according to Human Rights Watch. That number could be higher still, since the watchdog group didn’t include Sukhpal in its reporting. Who knows how many others may have been overlooked?

Roque fired first, being unable to differentiate between a devout Sikh and a radical Muslim, between an Indian and an Arab, between a small-business owner planting flowers and a terrorist hijacking a plane.

“I stand for America all the way!” Roque said when police came to his home to arrest him.

Roque had been boasting all over town that he was going to take revenge against “towel heads” and “rag heads.”

“We should round them all up and kill them,” Roque told a friend, according to a Huff Post article “A Unique Perspective on Hate-Crimes: The Story of a Convicted Killer.”

“We should kill their children, too,” Roque said, “because they'll grow up to be like their parents.”

Roque drove his pickup truck close to Balbir, shot him five times with a .38 caliber handgun and sped off.

Roque later opened fire on the home of an Afghan-American couple, and he also fired shots at a Lebanese-American man at a different gas station. No one was hit in either of those shootings.

Police would arrest Roque at his home. “I’m a patriot and an American,” he said as he surrendered. “I’m American. I'm a damn American!”

On the way to the station, he asked “How can you arrest me and let the terrorists run wild?!”

He would end up in prison. Bitter. Angry. And isolated.

Rana would end up at the White House. Multiple times. Surrounded by joy. Love. And hope.

But eventually, their paths would cross again.

Guilty verdict brought no joy to Balbir's family

Jim Walsh is a retired journalist, a veteran who worked 33 years for The Arizona Republic.

“I probably wrote 50 stories about this case,” he said in a phone interview.

Walsh is 70 years old and insists his memory isn’t what it used to be. If that’s true, he must have had the recall of a computer chip.

He remembered everything about this story, especially Rana.

“Rana is a very unique person,” Walsh said. “The reason I think so highly of Rana is the way he handled his personal grief. His brother Balbir was pointlessly murdered, you know? For no reason at all. And Rana could have wallowed in bitterness like a lot of people.

“But he chose to do the opposite. He instead dedicated his life to fight hate.”

Walsh explained the defense strategy during the three-week trial in 2003, saying lawyers never tried to argue that Roque wasn’t the killer; they said the attacks triggered a mental health crisis and that the court should be lenient.

“The whole trial was really about saving Frank’s life,” Walsh said.

Roque was found guilty. The decision to send him to death row took only about an hour.

But it brought no joy to Balbir’s family.

“I don’t want to celebrate, because there is nothing to celebrate here,” Balbir’s son Sukhwinder Singh Sodhi said in a Walsh story from October 2003, “Balbir ‘made us proud.’”

“My dad isn’t going to come back anyway. Another man is going to lose his life.”

A few years later, Roque’s sentence was reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“In our religion, we forgive everybody,” said Balbir’s brother Harjit Singh Sodi, according to a story Walsh worked on in August 2006, “9/11-tied slayer won’t be executed”.

Things went quiet for a long time, until a chance encounter between Rana and Frank Roque’s wife at a grocery store.

It led to a phone call that allowed Frank Roque to die with a clear conscience.

'What if we could rewrite the story?'

By 2016, Rana Singh Sodhi was tired.

He’d been talking about his brother’s death — really the deaths of both of his brothers — for 15 years. Every year, the same questions: How do you feel? How’s your family? Have you been able to move on?

The reality was that despite embarking on a life of activism, Rana was numb. This had been especially true after a 2012 attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin left seven dead and three wounded.

He was going through the motions at a memorial for Balbir at the gas station where he was killed, surrounded by white cloths, red roses and candles. Hundreds of people gathered to mourn and celebrate Balbir’s life.

Valarie Kaur was standing next to him, and she remembers him saying, “Nothing has changed.”

“He looked just as tired as I felt,” she said in a voice note to The Arizona Republic.

Kaur was a college student when the attacks happened. She got a camera and a grant from her university, then left school to drive across the country documenting cases of hate crimes. She’s since become a lawyer, a documentarian and an activist who started her career fighting hate.

But ever since the 15th anniversary of Balbir’s death, she’s been dedicated to spreading love.

She had been thinking more and more about love ahead of the 2016 memorial service.

“I thought, ‘Who is the one person we’ve not tried to love? What if we were not just victims, but agents of love? What if we could rewrite the story?’

“Love is a revolutionary force,” she said.

“I asked Rana a question I could never have imagined asking before. I asked, ‘If you had a chance to talk to Frank Roque in a spirit of reconciliation, would you?’

“And Rana said, ‘Yes, I would.’ Without hesitation.”

The next morning, she set up the call.

'We already forgave you'

Valarie Kaur remembers being anxious.

“As the phone was ringing, I remember my heart beating in my ears,” she said.

She had tried to reach out to Frank Roque years earlier, but he wouldn’t take the call. She also had no reason to believe he felt any sense of remorse for what he had done.

“We were really reaching out in the dark,” she said. “And so, I’m nervous, my heart is beating hard.”

Then Frank Roque answered.

She introduced herself and asked, “Why did you agree to speak with us?”

It turned out, it was because of an act of love from Rana.

A few years earlier, Rana had bumped into Frank’s wife and daughter at the grocery store. Rana was buying flowers for a memorial service for Balbir when he recognized them from the trial. He introduced himself and invited them to the service. They didn’t come, but that was OK with Rana. He had done what he could.

Ultimately, it was why Frank Roque decided to take the call. And when it came up, it was the moment that changed everything.

“We called Frank in prison in a recorded conversation on Sept. 16, 2016,” Rana wrote in an essay for The Arizona Republic. “It was the first time I had ever spoken to him. At first, Frank defended himself."

The recording makes clear just how gracious Rana was in that description.

“I’ve always told the truth about what happened to me, which caused me to do what happened to your loved one,” Frank Roque can be heard saying on the recording.

“The events of 9/11 so broke me down as a man that I could not control what happened. I want you … to understand that I was a man that was married for 15 years at that time, devoted to supporting my family through hard work — just like Balbir.

“I would never have done what happened of my own free will. What happened was a result of a mental breakdown over the events of 9/11. How could people crash planes full of people into buildings full of people? And after seeing that over and over, it took its toll on me. And I’m sad to say, I’m sorry to say, that was the end result of what I ended up doing.”

It was the same message Frank’s defense team presented at trial, and it ignored a detail that Jim Walsh couldn’t shake if he tried.

The prosecutors “showed this tape in court,” Walsh said. “It was something I hadn’t seen before, a piece of evidence they were holding onto for the right moment.”

It was a video from the interrogation room. Detectives left Roque alone. He had probably forgotten about the camera.

“I remember Frank Roque put his face in his hands and said, ‘My God, what have I done? What have I done? What have I done?’ It was very incriminating.”

Roque showed no such remorse during the trial, and he wasn’t budging on the call, either.

“He was refusing to take responsibility,” Valarie Kaur said, her voice full of emotion 10 years later. “I could feel rage rising within me like fire in a cage.

“I was thinking, ‘Perhaps, I was wrong. Perhaps, there is a limit to love. You don’t call your uncle’s murderer and try to reconcile with him.’

“I was thinking about how to protect Rana.”

Valarie ended up asking Frank, “Is there was anything you want to say to Rana?”

“The only thing I can say is I’m sorry for what happened to his brother as I’m sorry for what happened to the innocent other people who died on 9/11,” Roque said. “We all have to be sorry for that, also.”

As an apology, it was lukewarm. As gaslighting, it was a blazing furnace.

Valarie pressed Frank, saying that of course the 9/11 victims should be mourned and in fact they were, including on a plaque where Balbir was killed.

“There’s no question that we mourn the thousands who were lost on 9/11,” she said. “No question, but Frank, we’re talking to you to start thinking about forgiveness for the life that you took.”

“I do,” Roque said, agitated. “Believe me I do. I’m not a calloused man. I’m a religious man, also.”

Burning in the back of Frank’s mind was the conversation he’d had with his daughter about that chance meeting at the grocery store. (Neither Roque’s daughter nor his wife has been identified publicly.) His baby girl had told him on a visit that Rana had been kind to her and to her mother.

“And I prayed to God for forgiveness for what I have done,” Roque said. “And God has forgiven me for what I have done. And I express to you remorse for what I have done.”

That was enough for Rana.

“Frank, I’m hearing you,” Rana said. “I’m so thankful for what you say. I’m so glad today that you feel regret; you feel sorry. Because everybody makes mistakes.”

Frank cut in.

“I want you to know one other thing,” Roque said, explain that he was nearly 60 years old and had been having heart problems.

“One day when I go to heaven to be judged by God, I will ask to see your brother. And I will hug him, and I will ask him for forgiveness.”

Rana’s voice broke as he replied.

“We already forgave you,” he said.

He was crying. It sounded like Frank was crying. Valarie was crying, too.

Valarie and Rana hung up the phone and “sat in stunned silence,” she said in an interview with Boston’s public broadcast station, GBH, in 2016. “For 15 years, we had been living with the same story, but now the story had changed.”

The life he has now

Frank Roque died in prison in May 2022. He was 62.

He had applied for an early release, and Rana Singh Sodhi would have let him go free if it were his decision alone.

“If one day you come out, we can both go to the world and tell the story,” Rana wrote in the essay for The Republic.

“Since I got the news of Frank’s death, I have felt sorrow in my heart again. But in the end, Frank’s legacy is not only violence and hate. His memory is also one of reconciliation and love. I hope that Frank can see Balbir now, and that they hug each other, and that he apologizes to him. I hope they are both at peace.”

He went further in a recent phone conversation.

“Nobody in this world is perfect,” Rana said. “Nobody. I’m almost 60, and I’ve never seen a perfect man or a perfect woman in this world. Every person makes mistakes … and I feel like (Frank) regrets it.”

Rana has continued his advocacy, delivering a message of forgiveness as an antidote to hate everywhere he goes.

It’s not something that would have happened in India.

The nation’s government has never taken responsibility for the Sikh massacre. No apology. No reparations. No justice.

“That’s the reason a lot of Sikhs don’t want to live in India,” Rana said.

He feels differently about life in the U.S., even though his brothers were killed and he only received justice for one of them.

“I feel so much freedom in this country,” Rana said. “I honestly don’t think about how much hate we have in this country … This country is beautiful, and I’m still saying we are No. 1 in the world.

“But we need to keep our values … freedom of religion, color, creed and gender.”

That’s a point Jim Walsh, the veteran reporter, made, too.

“The most important thing about this family you need to know,” Walsh said, “is that they moved here for our Bill of Rights, and specifically freedom of religion. And they pursued a new life here … where they could exercise their religion without retaliation.

“They really believe in that Bill of Rights because they based their whole life on it.”

Well, much of their lives, anyway.

“Forgiveness comes from love,” Rana said, “and respect and humanity. If you don’t forgive anybody, how can we all live together? You can’t always trade an eye for an eye. We’ll all be blind.”

Spreading that message allows Rana Singh Sodhi to feel happiness 25 years after the tragedies threatened to leave him empty and hopeless forever.

That’s the life he has now, and it’s based on love and forgiveness.