In late July a sidebar in the Detroit Free Press caught my attention. The mother of one of the people reportedly killed in the raid, a man who had been identified as Mustafa Haddad, had hired an attorney to initiate a wrongful death suit against the government of the United States. If that wasn’t weird, it definitely was unusual. Families of terrorists rarely sued their assailants.

On a whim I decided to call her. It had the potential to be a good story. A friend in my battle buddy network had a contact at FedEx, who got me her phone number. She answered on the second ring. I introduced myself and started speaking without waiting for a response. To catch her attention, I said a few words in Arabic, basically a noncommittal commiseration: I share your sorrows. I am a big believer in the five-sentence rule: If I could get five sentences into an introduction without the other person hanging up, I’d get my interview. One: My name is … Two: I’m a reporter (always a reporter, never a journalist). Three: I am sorry about … (Or, when appropriate, I was happy to hear that…) Four: I understand you … (whatever action I was calling about). Five, the clincher: Would you tell me about … (your husband, wife, daughter, amazing animal)?

She wanted to talk. There wasn’t a comma of hesitation in her voice. She spoke firmly and clearly with a lilting accent I couldn’t quite pinpoint but recognized as from someplace in North Africa. Too many reporters had banged on her door and shouted nasty questions at her, she said. They had no respect, they had scared her. “Ghouls,” she said, “ghouls.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said somberly, while actually pleased that she considered me sympathetic.

Her lawyer, the cousin who had been born in America and worked very hard, a good man, had helped her file the lawsuit. “They killed my son, mister, they killed my son.” And then she wailed, a long primitive expression of a mother’s pain that instantly transported me to another life, in another place, at another time. “They killed my son.”

The one thing of which she was very certain was that her son was not a terrorist. She repeated that twice, three times. I sat at my desk, eyes closed, absorbing her emotion rather than hearing her cries. Unfortunately, I’d heard similar protests before, and then I’d found weapons hidden under floorboards. That didn’t make her pain any less real. But what was clear is that she wanted me to tell her story to the world. When finally she quieted, I said, with the sensitivity of a fisherman sensing a tug on his reel, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Haddad, but other people don’t believe this. If you want me to tell them about your son, I need your help. I need to know how you can be so certain.”

“My son, he was born in America,” she said, pausing at times to take a calming breath. “He was American. He didn’t care nothing about those people. Crazy people, he said they were. He didn’t go to the mosque or say his prayers. He played the games on the television, that was his love. And his motorcycle. And the girls. All the time I tell him, Mustafa, stop with the girls. He is a handsome boy, my son.”