I first saw it the day after the 9/11 attacks, when my fellow office workers cut their eyes at me.

When I got up to confront him, he sucked his teeth and walked away, disdain etched in his face. Later on, the same guard came to my cell to stare me down and shake his head. I couldn’t even escape it by turning off the radio because the housing unit officer saw it fit to broadcast over the intercom. I realized that the news was playing the audio from the murder, seemingly on a loop. And then there was another noise - a terrible sound.

The voice of a newscaster filled my cell one night, talking about the murder of Pearl earlier that year. To many of the inmates and corrections officers, I was the de facto Middle Eastern guy, despite my South Asian heritage. Every terror attack by extremist Muslims was placed squarely on my shoulders. Sitting in a jail 5 miles from the remains of the Twin Towers, there was little doubt in my mind that it was going to be bad news. “Yo Maq! Check out WABC they’re talking about y'all,” I remember one of my fellow ad-seg inmates calling out to me. The release of Pearl’s assailants took me back to 2002. I was seeking connection with the outside world through the measured voices of the anchors. To pass the time in my cold, cramped cell, I would listen to the New York sports channels and NPR on a handheld radio. Those years in solitary confinement were some of the worst I’ve had in my 18 years of incarceration. Before I was convicted of a robbery-related double homicide that I have consistently denied, I spent two years in the administrative segregation (ad-seg) unit of New Jersey’s Hudson County Correctional Facility.

Twin towers pizza