Forgiving Her Son's Killer: 'Not An Easy Thing'

It would be easy ? expected, even ? for Mary Johnson and Oshea Israel to be enemies. After all, he killed Johnson's only son, in 1993. He went to prison for that ? and toward the end of his sentence, he and Johnson made peace.

As a teenager in Minneapolis, Israel was involved with gangs and drugs. One night at a party, he got into a fight with Laramiun Byrd, 20, and shot and killed him. Oshea is now 34; he finished serving his prison sentence for murder about a year and a half ago.
 
Israel recently visited StoryCorps with Johnson, to discuss their relationship ? and the forgiveness it is built upon. As Johnson recalls, their first face-to-face conversation took place at Stillwater Prison, when Israel agreed to her repeated requests to see him.
 
"I wanted to know if you were in the same mindset of what I remembered from court, where I wanted to go over and hurt you," Johnson tells Israel. "But you were not that 16-year-old. You were a grown man. I shared with you about my son."
 
"And he became human to me," Israel says.
 
At the end of their meeting at the prison, Johnson was overcome by emotion.
 
"The initial thing to do was just try and hold you up as best I can," Israel says, "just hug you like I would my own mother."
 
Johnson says, "After you left the room, I began to say, 'I just hugged the man that murdered my son.'
"And I instantly knew that all that anger and the animosity, all the stuff I had in my heart for 12 years for you ? I knew it was over, that I had totally forgiven you."

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