Here are the details of how the same people Richard “Mac” McKinney wanted to kill at the Muncie, Indiana Mosque, ended up saving his life
As soon as some members of the Islamic Center of Muncie saw the man coming toward them, they knew he was trouble.
He was a big guy with broad shoulders, marching toward their mosque with his head down and his face flushed red from what looked like anger. It was Friday at Muncie Islamic Center in Muncie, Indiana, and the mosque was filling with people who had come for afternoon prayers. As an outsider with a USMC tattoo on his right forearm and a skull tattoo on his left hand, he stood out.
His name was Richard “Mac” McKinney, and he was there not to worship but to destroy. He was a former US Marine who had developed a hatred toward Islam during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. His fury deepened when he returned home to Muncie to see how Muslims had settled into what he called his city, and even sent their children to sit next to his daughter at her elementary school.
Unable to contain his anger, he went to the Islamic center that day in 2009 on what he saw as his final mission. He was going to plant a bomb at the mosque in hopes of killing or wounding hundreds of Muslims. He was on a scouting mission to pick a location to hide his bomb and to gather intelligence that would validate his assumption that Islam was a murderous ideology.
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“I told people that Islam was a cancer; and I was the surgeon to cure it,” he says.
But when McKinney entered the mosque, he encountered a form of resistance that he had not planned for. Something happened that day that would change him in a way he never expected.
The people whose lives he intended to take would end up saving his life.
What happened to McKinney at the mosque is so dramatic that it sounds like something from a movie. And in fact, it is.
McKinney’s transformation is the subject of a riveting documentary short called “Stranger at the Gate.” The film, which won a special jury prize at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, recounts how McKinney abandoned his plot and ended up converting to Islam and embracing a surprising role at the mosque.
McKinney recently spoke to CNN via video about his unlikely conversion. Wearing a blue “Say No Hate to Hate,” T-shirt over his muscular frame and a long white beard that made him look like a buffed Santa Claus, McKinney told his story in a blunt, no-frills manner that underscored his 25 years in the military.
McKinney says he thought his Friday afternoon visit might end with his death.
“By the end of the night, I figured they would have me in the basement with a sword to my throat,” he says.
Instead, several mosque members stepped forward and disarmed McKinney with some shrewd choices that may have saved their lives.
The film cites one staggering act of kindness: Mohammad S. Bahrami, a native of Afghanistan and co-founder of the center, ended up hugging McKinney and erupting in tears.
“To this day, it still doesn’t make sense to me,” McKinney says about the gesture.
Joshua Seftel, the film’s director, says he was drawn to McKinney’s story in part because of his own experiences facing antisemitism growing up in Schenectady, New York, in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Classmates lobbed antisemitic slurs while throwing pennies at him.
Seftel made his film as part of “The Secret Life of Muslims,” an online video series. He says McKinney’s story gave him hope that even some of the deepest divisions in the US can be transcended.
“They were able to build an impossible bridge to one another,” Seftel says of McKinney and members of the Muncie Islamic center. “If that could happen, anything is possible. They gave us a blueprint for how we could all do this.”
To reveal too many details about how McKinney converted would rob the film of its impact. But there are some scenes and characters that beg to be described.
One was the story of how McKinney was changed by combat. McKinney’s struggles after he returned to Muncie in 2006 are a prime example of the adage, “In war there are no unwounded soldiers.”
McKinney says he was trained to see the Iraqi and Taliban soldiers he fought not as human beings but as paper targets on a shooting range. He also says he struggled to find a new community after he left what he calls the “band of brothers” he fought alongside during his service. Once he returned home, he drifted into drinking and womanizing to numb his wartime experiences.
Seeing Muslims only caused his pain to resurface. He resented the presence of Muslims in Muncie because it seemed to make a mockery of the sacrifice he and his comrades made in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I wasn’t willing to share,” he says. “I saw America as mine. I bled for this. It was a ‘You don’t belong here’ kind of thing.”
Layered in his grief was also guilt over the lives he had taken during combat. He wasn’t just at war with Muslims; he was at war with himself.
“He can’t completely forgive himself for what he did,” says Dana, one of his ex-wives, in the film.
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There were plenty of people who helped diffuse McKinney’s anger and guilt.
One was Jomo Williams, an African American member at the Islamic center who knew something about anger. His great-great-grandfather was lynched and castrated by a White mob. He carried a hostility toward White people until he converted to Islam.
Karl Schroder
Williams was one of the first to spot McKinney striding toward the mosque, looking agitated and angry.
“When I saw him, he was walking kind of fast, his head was kind of down, and he was kind of red in the face a little bit,” Williams says in the film. “I knew something was wrong.”
As viewers can see in the film, Williams later asked McKinney a question that set him on his path to conversion.
But if there is a heroine in “Stranger at the Gate,” it’s a magnetic woman everyone calls “Sister Bibi.”
Bahrami’s hospitality is remarkable considering many Muslim Americans are still treated like strangers in their own country. Hate crimes against Muslims in the US surged 500% from 2000 to 2009, according to a Brown University study, reflecting an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment after the 9/11 attacks.
Many still face hostility, surveillance and questions over their patriotism.
He kept visiting Bahrami and others at the center. He read the Quran, Islam’s holy book. He formed friendships. He told mosque members about his time in combat and they accepted him.
Eight months after McKinney’s initial visit to the mosque, he converted to Islam. After the ceremony he was greeted with what he called “a mosh pit of hugs” from the people he once intended to harm. Eventually he even served two years as president of the Islamic Center in Muncie.
When asked how he felt when he was showered with hugs following his conversion ceremony, McKinney broke into a wide, boyish grin:
“I was good with that.”
