Friendship: It Was a Mistake
June 29, 2024 On a July evening in 1990, for the first time since the birth of her second child, Debbie Baigrie went out with some friends. Accompanied by a male friend, she was returning to her car. As the two were talking, Ian Manuel, a young black teenager egged on by some older teens, came up behind them and demanded some money.
Debbie turned to find a gun in her face. She screamed. Ian fired.
One of the bullets entered her mouth, ricocheted off a tooth, and exited through her cheek. Terrified, Debbie fled as fast as she could, with blood flowing from her face. Ian shot the gun a few more times at Debbie as she ran off and also at the man who was with her. Ian then dropped the gun in some bushes, turned, and ran.
A few days later, Ian was arrested in an unrelated case. While talking to the police, he volunteered that he was the one who had shot the white woman downtown a few nights earlier. Ian was thirteen years old. Despite his age, he was tried as an adult. He was found guilty and sentenced to three life sentences in prison without the possibility of parole. At the age of fourteen, Ian would become the youngest inmate in the prison.
As his second Christmas in prison approached, having come across Debbie’s contact information in his file, Ian impulsively made a collect call to her. She debated whether to accept the charges for the call. The damage to her jaw was extensive. Her dentist had cried when he saw it. Debbie had lost five teeth and much of her jaw. She would undergo more than ten years of over forty painful surgeries. But at that moment, she decided to accept Ian’s call. Ian wished her and her family a Merry Christmas. He then apologized for shooting her.
As Ian related later in his book, titled My Time Will Come: A Memoir of Crime, Punishment, Hope, and Redemption, Debbie asked why Ian had shot her.
He hesitantly replied that it had all been a mistake. Just before he needed to hang up, he asked if it would be okay if he contacted her again. She said yes.
Debbie later explained that she was in such pain and couldn't eat. She was angry. But after going back and forth with herself, she began to feel sympathetic. Ian was just a kid and kids do stupid stuff. In the end, she found it wasn’t difficult to forgive him.
The two began a periodic correspondence in which Debbie encouraged Ian to get his GED High School equivalency degree and reminded him about the importance of being well-read and staying positive. And that he needed to keep learning and improving himself.
As Ian studied for his GED, he told Debbie about his test results, which were very good. He explained that she became a mother to him and helped him grow up. In 2010, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against life without the possibility of parole for juveniles charged with anything less than murder, Ian's attorney appealed his sentence. At his resentencing hearing on November 10, 2016, Debbie was there, just three rows behind him. Ian was released from prison that very night. He was forty years old and had spent twenty-six years in prison, eighteen of them consecutively in solitary confinement.
When he left prison and as he was trying to build a life he was so unprepared for, Debbie was there. She affirmed that Ian had become like an adopted son. After his release, Ian began working with the Equal Justice Initiative, the legal rights group that took up his case in 2006 in hopes of overturning his sentence. He also started writing his memoir, which includes some of his poetry and was published in 2022.
All his life, Ian had been told by society and the justice system that he would never amount to anything. That he would die alone in solitary, and no one would know. Debbie had other ideas. She saw the potential that others had not and knew that a thirteen-year-old boy could make mistakes, life-changing mistakes, but those mistakes and a troubled childhood did not mean he was beyond redemption.
But Debbie did not only forgive, she offered encouragement and guidance. And friendship.
Sometimes when we forgive, the other person and we never meet again. We each go about our separate ways. But to offer forgiveness to the extent that the one who forgives takes an ongoing interest in the one who has been forgiven, and who then becomes a positive part of that person's life, is even more admirable.
When Ian asked if he could call her again, Debbie could have said no. After all, she had taken his call and spoken to him. He would have been reassured that the woman who was in so much pain because of his actions not only agreed to talk to him but wasn't angry with him. That would have meant a great deal to Ian. So Debbie could have said, “No” with a clear conscience, knowing that she had done more than most people would have. But she said, “Yes.” Then when they started corresponding, it wasn’t quick reads dashed off with quick responses. She told of how articulate his letters were, his extensive vocabulary, his thoughtfulness, and how smart he was. And of his remorse.
Debbie offered a lifeline—friendship—to a teenage boy in an unimaginably painful existence.
In friendship, we tend to ignore the things that separate us and focus on what we have in common. Because we are already friends, it is not difficult to forgive the other person because we share a history of trusting for and caring about each other. When we remember the good times, it's easier to let go of disagreements and misunderstandings.
Developing a friendship with someone you once feared would kill you and who caused the agonizing pain of over forty dental surgeries is remarkable, to say the least. Which explains Ian’s and Debbie’s story being periodically featured in major news media. Such a friendship requires a level of trust far beyond that of ordinary friendship. For Ian, it meant trusting that Debbie wouldn’t hurt him. For Debbie, it meant trusting that Ian wouldn’t hurt her again.
First, Ian had to trust that this woman he almost killed would not turn on him and find a way to make his situation even worse; for instance, by saying at his resentencing hearings that his remorse was insincere and she had not forgiven him. Or, perhaps even more painful, declare him worthless, a hopeless cause and desert him.
But Debbie had to trust Ian too. Why? After all, how could Ian, a person in prison for life, hurt someone on the outside?
By disappointing her.
It took courage and determination for Debbie to choose to trust that Ian would not disappoint her as she supported him through their correspondence, especially when her family and friends discouraged her from doing so. It took courage to trust that her friendship would, in the end, not have been wasted. The recidivism rate for people with backgrounds similar to Ian's is very high in a justice system that focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation.
While Debbie was trying to help Ian, her husband and friends feared that she was suffering from some strange condition, maybe a form of Stockholm syndrome, in which the victim of a kidnapper or abuser develops a psychological bond with the other person. But what was happening was not psychological, it was karmic. It was complicated, as karmic connections invariably are. But in spite of the horrifying way in which it continued in her present life, it brought her back to what appears to have been, at some point in an earlier lifetime, a caring relationship.
Our past actions, our karmas, lead us into a situation. But we have a choice in how to react to what is happening. We can do what we have so often done—choose the easy way and let things unfold without much thought or effort on our part. Or we can choose what is difficult, but that we know is right.
When Ian came across Debbie's name and phone number in his file, he impulsively called her. And then apologized. There was no watered-down apology, no mumbling of words, no confusion as to what to say and why he was doing it. Just an honest, concise admission to what he had done: “Miss Baigrie I called to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and to apologize for shooting you in the face.”1
This is a master class in how to apologize. Forget the mumbled “sorry” or even “I’m sorry.” Start with “I, apologize,” and then articulate what the apology is for by naming it. Not just “for shooting you” as in Ian’s case, but “for shooting you in the face.” Sincere, unconditional, and to the point.
Many of us have difficulty admitting to ourselves that we made a mistake. Admitting it to the person we hurt or offended and then offering a complete, honest apology takes courage. Courage that Ian, a teenage boy, clearly summoned up. Then he also summoned the courage to ask Debbie if he could contact her again. And then not only did he do so by writing to her, he shared his poetry with her.
Ian courageously chose to call and apologize. Debbie courageously chose to accept the call. Then also forgave him. As she said, her forgiveness came from her acceptance that, as Ian had admitted, he had made a mistake.
Many would have responded to this with “Yes, and now you need to live with the consequences. You need to pay.” Debbie chose not only to acknowledge that Ian had made a mistake but to understand that a thirteen-year-old boy is still a child. She felt that children need to not only live with the consequences of their actions but also need to have the opportunity to learn from them.
For Ian, Debbie’s friendship was transformative. Instead of thinking of himself as an irredeemable prisoner who had shot an innocent woman in the face, he viewed himself as having been a thirteen-year-old boy who had made a terrible mistake. A boy who was now a man who did not need to be defined by that mistake for the rest of his life. Debbie’s forgiveness and friendship helped Ian to survive eighteen years in solitary confinement, to cease his acting-out behavior, earn his GED, and write his memoir. He was able to not only reform but to thrive.
Debbie has used what happened to change some of her priorities as she refocused her energy. She became a bodybuilder and helps raise money to fund college scholarships for at-risk teens.
Together, Ian and Debbie have spoken about their friendship and forgiveness. And, together, they have shown how friendship and forgiveness, when intertwined, will further enhance both qualities. And all who practice them.
1. https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2017/upstanders-befriending-her-shooter/
June 27, 2024