by Susan Hames, CSJ
“Drugs, egos, my crew and his playing off each other, it went too far.” That’s how Oshea Israel remembers the night he murdered Laramiun Byrd, 20, the only son of Mary Johnson. Tried and convicted as an adult at 16, Oshea received a 25-year prison sentence.
“I thought of my son’s killer as an animal that deserved to be caged,” says Mary Johnson after the trial. For 12 years Mary nurtured hate for this young man.
A poem entitled “The Two Mothers” changed her heart. In the poem two mothers meet in heaven and talk about the joy of their sons’ growing up. One is Mary, Jesus’ mother, who tells the other, “When they crucified him…How gladly would I have hung there in his place.”
Mary asks the other woman the name of her son “that I may share your grief and woe.”
The other woman answers, “He was Judas Iscariot; I am his mother.”
The poem challenged Mary Johnson to work on herself and her anger. “I asked God what I had to do,” she says. “I prayed for Oshea. I chose to forgive.”
Slowly Mary came to the point of wanting to visit Oshea in prison. To prepare, she participated in four hours of required training in victim-offender dialog. She had to explain why she wanted to meet Oshea.
That visit changed both their lives. They shared their stories.
“We just got to know each other,” Oshea remembers.
In the end Mary asked to hug Oshea. “I remember thinking that I just hugged the man who murdered my son. The anger was over, gone. Now I treat him like a son. The hand of God was all over this.”
“Anger will eat you from the inside out,” says Mary, who founded an organization to heal other mothers of murder victims—From Death to Life. “The forgiveness was for me,” she explains.
Oshea didn’t want to go home from prison the same person he came in. He served 17 years, lives next door to Mary, and does presentations with her in schools and churches.
- When have you experienced a challenge to change your heart?