Survivors of Racist Killer’s Victims Reveal Sadness, Strength

SALEM, Ill. — The stolen minivan had crashed in a ditch on a dark rural highway about a mile from a park where thousands had gathered for July 4 fireworks.

“Show me your hands! Get your hands up!” Deputy David Hiltibidal yelled as he approached.

But the suspect--covered in blood after shooting himself in the chin--didn’t move or say a word.

The silent defiance made Hiltibidal and the three officers with him even more uneasy. It seemed the driver might be looking to die--seeking, as they would later confirm, the ultimate Independence Day for an angry young white man shooting anyone who didn’t look like him.

By the time he reached Salem, 21-year-old Benjamin Smith had traveled more than 1,000 miles in about 48 hours, firing shots at several sites and leaving two dead and nine wounded. The victims included Orthodox Jews walking to synagogue, a black man strolling with his children and an Asian graduate student heading to church.

A year after that fatal holiday weekend, a trip retracing Smith’s journey finds that the shootings are a vague memory for many, just another fading image from a TV screen increasingly filled with violence. But for those personally touched by the shootings, there is no vagueness, and no quick end to horrors that began with what seems a cosmic tap on the shoulder, reminding them that hate endures in a nation founded on the idea that all people are created equal.

Reminding them and, unintentionally, challenging them to do something about it.

A Jewish Family Speaks Out in Anger

Ephraim Wolfe still carries a .380-caliber bullet from Smith’s gun embedded in the bone just below his right kneecap. Pain still shoots through his leg sometimes.

But the 16-year-old’s parents say he carries the bullet like a “badge of courage.”

“Jews have always been running and running and running for thousands of years,” said Ephraim, a lanky, athletic youth. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

It was nearly sundown on Friday, July 2, 1999, the beginning of the Sabbath, when Ephraim was walking to synagogue on Chicago’s far North Side with other men and boys, all Orthodox Jews dressed in dark suits, white shirts and wide-brimmed black hats.

The neighborhood, lined with rows of tidy brick homes, was Benjamin Smith’s first stop--and Ephraim was one of his first targets.

At first, Ephraim did not realize what had happened.

But then, he said, “When I looked at my pants and saw blood on my leg, I immediately became angry.”

And he and his parents decided to speak out. They filed a lawsuit against Matt Hale, the leader of the East Peoria-based World Church of the Creator and a friend of Smith’s. In the suit, the Wolfes allege that Hale’s racist rhetoric, including calls for a “racial holy war,” spurred Smith into action. Hale has adamantly denied the allegations and calls the legal action, and similar lawsuits by others against him, frivolous.

The Wolfes say they want to shut Hale down.

“We can’t live our lives in fear. We can’t hole up in our fortress waiting for the eventuality that something else will happen,” said Miriam Wolfe, Ephraim’s mother. “That’s the goal of the terrorist. That’s what Smith wanted. That’s what Matt Hale wants.

“We’re not going to give them the satisfaction.”

Victim’s Wife Takes Stand Against Violence

It would take Benjamin Smith just 17 minutes after leaving north Chicago that night to spot Ricky Byrdsong, walking with his two youngest children in their quiet well-to-do neighborhood in suburban Skokie.

Did Smith have any idea that Byrdsong, a business consultant and author, was the former basketball coach at Northwestern University? Maybe, maybe not. What he did know was that Byrdsong was black.

One of seven bullets he fired killed the 43-year-old coach.

Byrdsong’s widow, Sherialyn, almost immediately took a strong public stand against violence, speaking out, forming a foundation in her husband’s name and setting out to finish his book, “Coaching Your Kids in the Game of Life,” which was released in May.

“It’s a shame that you have to try to make something good from something evil,” she said recently. “But what else can you do?”

Her strength comes from her Christian faith, she said.

Daughters Sabrina and Kelley, now 13 and 11, and 9-year-old son Ricky Jr. are handling the loss in different ways, she said. “It’s a range. One of them is having a hard time adjusting. Another one is doing OK. And the third . . . probably is still in shock--numb about it. I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet.”

Anya Cordell, who lives nearby, marvels at Sherialyn Byrdsong’s “incredible presence”--something she first saw when the widow joined neighbors who walked with signs and flowers to honor Ricky Byrdsong last July 4, just two days after the shooting.

In the subsequent months, the walks continued nightly with as many as 70 people until cold weather set in.

Cordell and her husband, Geoff, often walk around 8 p.m., the time Byrdsong was shot.

“I really do think it’s an incredible thing for people to gather and walk like we did, night after night after night,” Cordell said. “It’s different than a rally or politicians making decrees and putting up plaques.

“The real antidote to destruction is creation--and creating it over a long period of time.”

*

No one knows Benjamin Smith’s exact path, only where he fired next. After leaving Skokie, he shot at and missed an Asian American couple in Northbrook, another suburb north of Chicago. On Saturday, July 3, he sped through three central Illinois towns and injured three men, two of them black and another Taiwanese. From there, he drove through the cornfields and rolling wooded hills across the state line to Bloomington, Ind.

There, on Sunday, July 4, he found his next target: Won-Joon Yoon, a 26-year-old Korean student at Indiana University who was shot in the back as he walked into his church.

“He died because someone thought he wasn’t good enough,” said Catherine Matthews, his fiancee, her voice shaking.

She is still unpacking in her Bloomington apartment, where she moved last August.

Most of the walls are still bare. But there are a few reminders, including a small framed photo of Yoon and across the room a photo of Matthews standing with Sherialyn Byrdsong. Yoon’s cat, SoHo, prowls with her own cat; his jazz CDs rest on a shelf.

“I hate it here,” said Matthews, who met Yoon in Seoul and dated him while both were students at Southern Illinois University.

But for now, she has no plans to leave. “I realized that I couldn’t be in a place that didn’t know what had happened to the most important person in my life--the most important event in my life . . .,” said Matthews, a doctoral student in higher education. “So as difficult as it is to be here, I think it would be more difficult to be someplace else.

“His death has to matter. . . .

“He was a wonderful man,” she said, smiling, her cheeks damp with tears. “He was the kind of person who could light up a room when he walked in.”

She feels guilt--that she was away for the summer and not able to do something to prevent his death.

And she feels anger, still too raw to share with most people.

“They don’t really want to know how bad it is to be a survivor of this,” she said.

One reason is the sheer randomness of the killing--that even one stoplight, delaying Smith, could have bought Yoon enough time to get into the church.

“I think that’s what makes this kind of crime a community crime,” Matthews said. “The community becomes the victim, and there’s no rhyme or reason for it.”

Indeed, there is a nagging feeling of helplessness in Bloomington, where residents had made it clear that Benjamin Smith’s hate was not welcome a year before the shootings. Doug Bauder remembers watching Smith, a former Indiana University student, standing at a distance during one anti-hate rally with a sign that read, “No Hate Speech Means No Free Speech.”

“One of my personal regrets was that I didn’t take time to seek him out,” said Bauder, a member of Bloomington United, a group formed in response to racist leaflets Smith was dropping all over town. “I don’t know what I could’ve done. But maybe there was something.”

*

By Sunday evening, July 4, authorities in Illinois and Indiana had the name of the man they were looking for. They knew the license number of his blue Taurus.

Hiltibidal and his fellow deputies figure that Smith hijacked the minivan in a panic; he left cash and ammunition in the Taurus. But he had enough with him in the van to do great damage: two handguns and a duffel bag brimming with loaded gun clips.

Seconds after Hiltibidal yelled for him to put his hands up, Smith grabbed for one of the guns on the van floor.

Hiltibidal dove for it too, wrestling but having a hard time holding Smith because he was so slippery with blood.

As they fought for the gun, one shot went off, narrowly missing an officer. Smith then shot himself again in the abdomen and leg, gurgling a two-word obscenity as the officers finally restrained him.

Only later at the hospital--as doctors removed his shirt to reveal a tattoo on his chest that said “Sabbath Breaker”--would the officers learn just whom they had encountered on that dark stretch of highway.

In less than an hour, reporters began circling, waiting for the weary officers to finish telling their stories to the FBI.

The rampage that had terrified two states was over.

But there would be no chance to confront Smith.

He died--just as the fireworks Hiltibidal and his partner had planned to watch began to light up the night sky.