Fatal Convictions

9

For Khalid Mobassar, sleep had become a luxury. He spent each night in the reclining chair next to Ghaniyah’s bed, waking when she stirred, checking on her while she slept, exulting in each small step on the road to recovery. When Ghaniyah was moved from ICU to the brain trauma rehab center, Khalid followed her, hauling his small duffel bag of clothes and toiletries, his briefcase full of books and papers, his computer, his prayer rug, and his Qur’an. He left her side for only a few hours each day to go home and shower and to stop by the mosque.

The medical side of things was confusing at best. Khalid became familiar with the vocabulary of treatment for traumatic brain injury, or TBI, both from listening to the doctors and from scouring the Internet. Ghaniyah had been admitted to the hospital with a 12 on the Glasgow Coma Scale, indicating moderate brain damage. She had briefly lost consciousness before rescuers arrived at the scene. Fortunately, a CT scan and MRI showed no swelling of the brain or the type of cranial bleeding that would require surgical intervention.

But according to the doctors, many closed head injuries produced microscopic changes not easily detectable on the radiological tests. Ghaniyah’s official diagnosis was moderate traumatic brain injury with diffuse axonal injury and ischemia. Her prognosis for a full recovery was “guarded.”

Five days after the accident, a neuropsychologist had performed a basic neurological assessment designed to reveal the extent of the damage. A full battery of neuropsych testing would come later, but the preliminary results were sobering. Though no longer in a coma, Ghaniyah had suffered memory loss, personality change, and moderate impairment to her executive functioning skills. She had a hard time trying to focus and couldn’t handle more than one task at a time. She experienced mood swings and depression. These were all symptoms of right frontoparietal injury, the neuropsychologist explained. For Khalid, it felt like someone had taken the woman he married and placed another person in her body, someone more sluggish and with unpredictable emotions.

But Khalid was determined to love her back to a full recovery. What else could he do?

He read to her for hours each day from the Qur’an, an activity that soothed her and moderated her mood swings. She joined him in the salats as well-from her hospital bed the first few days but on her prayer mat after that. Still, she seemed to lack the religious fervor of the woman Khalid had been married to for thirty-two years. It was this aspect of her personality change that gave him the most heartache.

The doctors said he could take Ghaniyah home in a few days, a prospect that terrified Khalid. His wife wasn’t ready to be left alone-you could tell that by looking in her vacant eyes. But the insurance company was insisting that she could recover at home with outpatient therapy just as well as she could at the hospital. For Khalid, it felt like she would be out of sight and out of mind, the neuropsychologists and brain-injury specialists moving on to the next patient.

These thoughts preoccupied him as he watched the news on Thursday evening while shuffling through some papers. Lying on the bed, Ghaniyah dozed in and out.

The subject matter of a local news story caught his attention-a teenage Muslim girl being discriminated against because she wanted to wear a hijab to work. The young lady was not a member of Khalid’s mosque, but he admired her boldness. It seemed a little strange that she was so insistent on working in a surf shop, but then again, who could understand the mind of a teenage girl? At least she had the courage to stand up for her convictions, even if it made her feel like an outcast.

When the story segued to the courthouse steps, Khalid almost dropped his papers on the floor.

“Him?” Khalid said out loud when Alex’s face first appeared on the screen. Khalid reached for the remote and turned up the volume.

The same lawyer he had met in Ghaniyah’s room last week was explaining how he had landed his client a job at a competing surf shop. He talked about the importance of a pluralistic society and accommodating one another’s religious beliefs. He talked about accepting people for who they were instead of turning them all into Madison Avenue clones. His client stood beside him, beaming at the prospect of working at Burke’s Surf Shop.

When the news moved on to the next story, Khalid turned down the volume and thought about what he had just seen. Maybe he had misjudged the Reverend Alexander Madison. The man hadn’t seemed like a crusader when he came into Ghaniyah’s hospital room; he had seemed like a sleazy, opportunistic lawyer. Maybe he was. But Khalid had to give the man credit-Mr. Madison was resourceful. And they certainly needed that type of lawyer for Ghaniyah’s case… if she had a case at all.

Ghaniyah couldn’t remember the impact or the events that immediately followed, but she remembered what led up to the accident. A tractor trailer had pulled out to pass her on North Landing Road-a narrow, two-lane road that wound through the southern part of Virginia Beach. When an oncoming vehicle appeared around the corner, the driver of the tractor trailer swerved back into Ghaniyah’s lane even though his rig was not all the way past her. Ghaniyah had no choice but to swerve to the right. The last thing she remembered was her tires leaving the pavement as she careened toward a pine tree.

Now Khalid faced piles of medical bills and perhaps long-term care for Ghaniyah. If the driver of the tractor trailer had caused the accident, why shouldn’t he pay for the consequences?

They just had to locate him first. The driver hadn’t stopped, and the police had no leads. But one of the men in Khalid’s mosque had worked as an insurance adjuster. He explained to Khalid that such events might be compensable under the uninsured motorist provisions of his automobile policy.

Khalid quietly searched Ghaniyah’s room for Mr. Madison’s card. When he couldn’t find it, he pulled up the firm’s Web site and wrote down the office number. He would call Mr. Madison as soon as Ghaniyah was released from the hospital and things settled down a bit. What could it hurt?

A Muslim imam and a Christian pastor. This could make for some interesting dynamics.