SHORT TAKES
Stories that Haunt
On a winter’s morning in 1978, when I was twenty-five and trying too hard to write like Jimmy Breslin, I came to work and was thrown into a story that would haunt me for years. I have since covered many sadder stories, and more horrific ones, too. But all those stories ended. This one never did, at least not for me, until now.
The story began on the morning of February 1, when a Syrian immigrant named Nabil Al-Sheikh Hassan drove to his in-laws’ home in Bernardsville, New Jersey, and threatened to blow himself up if his estranged wife did not surrender to him their two young children. He had doused himself in gasoline. He had four Bic lighters and ten gallons of gasoline and lighter fluid.
I was working for the Courier-News in nearby Bridgewater. It was my first newspaper and I’d been there for two years. Suffice it to say that we covered the stuff local dailies are made of, and we had never had a day like the day when Nabil Hassan came for his children. Here, at last, was drama. The police descended, and with them came the fire department, ambulances, and a helicopter. Hassan allowed a princess phone to be delivered to the car. And as people began talking with him I was sent to find out who he was.
I drove all day, picking up a trail that took me through New Jersey and ended in a Pennsylvania bar where Hassan spent his out-of-work afternoons. Along the way I learned that he had come from Syria in the 1960s with little money but with considerable drive. He had since earned a B.A. and M.A., the latter in political philosophy from Drew University, in Madison, New Jersey. It was at Drew that he met a woman named Mary, whom he married. They had a son who was three, and a year-and-a-half-old daughter. The family had spent a year in Syria and then returned to the United States.
And now Nabil Hassan wanted to take the children back to Syria. He talked with the police, and with old friends and mentors, for ten hours, all the while threatening his violent immolation. Only after his wife complied with his demand to take the children to Kennedy Airport did he finally relent and step out of the car.
He spent that night in a private psychiatric hospital. I spent it at the Homestead, a bar in New Brunswick, drinking vodka gimlets, thinking that I had at last lived the sort of newspaper day I’d always imagined.
The story might have concluded there for me, on that naïve and buoyant note, had I not been assigned to follow his case. Hassan, who had threatened harm only to himself, was not charged with a crime. Instead, he stayed on in the psychiatric hospital and, after his release, was somehow granted supervised visits with his children. His wife, meanwhile, was proceeding with a divorce. By summer the story was over. I was getting ready to leave for vacation when I got a call to say that Mary Hassan wanted to talk with me.
I found her in despair. The night before, Nabil Hassan had come to her apartment, struck her, and left with the children. He had fled the country. The children were with him in Syria. Even now, twenty-four years later, I can still see her sitting on her couch, swollen-eyed and helpless. I moved to a job near Chicago a month later and so was left with that enduring image: she had lost her children. I assumed she never saw them again.
Her story stayed with me not only for the desperation and sadness I had witnessed, but because it occurred in my first sublime newspaper moment. Only with time and with more stories would I come to recognize the discomfort most every journalist feels in associating so many of the best memories with the saddest times.
Years later I returned to the East Coast, still carrying that frozen image of Mary Hassan. I began to make the occasional inquiries. But I found nothing. Nabil Hassan had vanished. So had his children, and so had his wife. Still, I had saved the front page from the first day. And, not long ago, I set out to learn how the story had ended.
The police knew nothing, and neither did the prosecutors. Sources had moved away to points unknown, or had died. But then a lawyer for Mary Hassan’s father told me he’d heard that things might have, in fact, worked out well for her. More than that he did not know. I went back to the clips, and happened upon the name of David Cowell, a professor of Nabil Hassan’s at Drew, and a negotiator that day.
He knew. Nabil Hassan, he told me, was indeed in Damascus. The children were not. Several years after he took the children, Hassan returned with them to the United States. “He felt the children should see their mother,” Cowell explained. Hassan had insisted on safe passage. But he was arrested almost immediately, and jailed. The children were returned to Mary Hassan. Nabil Hassan remained in the Morris County Jail for three months and was released only on the condition that he leave the United States and never return.
He calls David Cowell every few years, seeking a reference or advice. He has worked sporadically. He is fifty-six and lives in his parents’ home.
Mary Hassan did not wish to speak about any of this, and, understandably,
neither did anyone in her family. The children whom I believed
she had lost are adults. I still wince at the memory of the young
man at the Homestead bar, celebrating the day.
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