DAD FORMS BOND WITH MAN WHO MURDERED HIS SON

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Dad Forms Bond with Man Who Murdered His Son: 'We Are Very Much a Family' (Exclusive)

“I’ve taken on a fatherly role with Tony because his father was not in his life,” Azim Khamisa tells PEOPLE of the man who killed his son Tariq in 1995

By Joanne Fowler|

Published on April 10, 2024 09:00AM EDT

 

This post is a collaboration between PEOPLE and StoryCorps, the largest collection of human voices ever archived.

 

Trying to deliver pizza in San Diego one Saturday evening in January 1995, college sophomore Tariq Khamisa searched for a customer’s home. Unaware that he had been given a bogus address, he knocked on several doors before finally giving up. 

 

As the San Diego State University student began to leave, a group of four teenage gang members, who did not know Tariq, attempted to rob him, according to his 75-year-old father, Azim Khamisa. He resisted, and 14-year-old Tony Hicks shot and killed him.

 

“Tariq died a couple of minutes later, drowning in his own blood,” Khamisa tells PEOPLE.

 

When the San Diego police reached out to share the devastating news, he couldn’t comprehend it.

 

“I didn’t believe it was true,” says Khamisa, a La Jolla, Calif.-based businessman. “He was a good kid, and so I thought sometimes there is an issue of mistaken identity.”

 

He called Tariq's home and his son's fiancé answered, sobbing, barely able to speak. The hard truth began to sink in: His son was dead.

 

“I was in my kitchen and remembered losing strength in both of my legs,” recalls Khamisa. “I collapsed on the floor, curled up in a ball, hit my head against the refrigerator and I had my first out-of-body experience because the pain was essentially unbearable.”

 

“I left my body,” he says. “I believe I went into the embrace of God and I don’t remember how long I was gone for, but I came back to my body with the wisdom that there are victims at both ends of the gun. I never went into anger and resentment towards Tony, because he was 14.”

 

Eventually, through frequent meditation, he felt driven to forgive his son’s killer and to give meaning to his son’s life, as he previously recalled to StoryCorps.

 

Nine months later, he founded the Tariq Khamisa Foundation to honor his son and to help other at-risk children avoid lives of crime. 

 

Through a variety of programs, the foundation works closely with teachers and counselors to identify kids in danger of falling behind academically or frequently missing school.

 

“Tony joined a gang in sixth grade,” says Khamisa. “So we focus on fourth grade to 10th grade. The mission of the foundation is essentially to save kids’ lives.”

 

Khamisa reached out to Hicks, who had been tried as an adult, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years at Folsom State Prison. But Hicks wasn’t ready to meet the father of the young man he killed, so Khamisa reached out in forgiveness to Hicks’ grandfather, Ples Felix, and asked him to join him in his work with children.

 

At the time of the murder, Hicks — whose mother was 14 when she gave birth and sent him to live with his grandfather in San Diego to escape her gang-ridden neighborhood in Los Angeles — was in the 8th grade and had recently run away from the home. “I didn’t know what my next step was going to be,” Hicks, now 43, tells PEOPLE. “I was trying to impress my friends [by shooting Tariq] in hopes of not being abandoned by them or rejected by them.”

 

“Of course, I knew that I had done something wrong,” he adds of that fateful night in 1995. “When I was captured, I lied to the police because deep down I knew I had done something wrong. I wasn’t allowing myself to think because I would have made a different decision. My feelings at that moment were directly connected to my desire to not be rejected by this last family structure I had.”

 

Five years after Tariq’s murder, Khamisa finally met his son’s killer face to face, he recalled to PEOPLE.

 

“The seminal moment was when we locked eyeballs,” recalls Khamisa. “Tony was 19 and I’m trying to find a murderer in him and I wasn’t. He was remorseful. He was well-mannered... So I told him, ‘I’ve forgiven you.' "

 

It would take 15 more years for Tariq’s only sibling, sister Tasreen, 51, to meet her brother’s killer.

 

“I was very, very angry and I was in a lot of pain,” says Tasreen. “My brother was my best friend and my confidant. I had the role of his big sister at a very young age. I started taking care of him alone when he was 5 and I was 7. We were latchkey kids and I was always his protector.”

 

In 2014, she became executive director of the Tariq Khamisa Foundation, which has reached over 2 million kids primarily in California and Pennsylvania.

 

Through her work at the foundation, Tasreen began dealing with some of her anger and pain.

 

"My forgiveness journey was very different from my father’s,” she says. ”I started getting a lot deeper into restorative justice and understanding how hurt people hurt people and how healed people heal people."

 

The following year Tasreen traveled to the prison to meet with Hicks for the first time. Though they didn’t exchange words at first, Tasreen immediately felt at ease.

 

“He just gave me this huge hug, this big, huge bear hug,” she says. “I’m 4’ 11” and he’s 6’1” and he just picked me up. I felt a lot of warmth around us. I felt my brother strongly there with us.”

 

When Hicks was released from prison in 2019 after serving 24 years and four months of his 25-year sentence, he joined the board of the foundation. Now he often speaks alongside Khamisa at school assemblies.

 

“Being able to work with the foundation, being able to have a connection with Azim and Tasreen and her children, has helped me greatly in my healing process,” says Hicks, who now works as a plumber. “It makes me feel a level of joy to be able to do something like this and work towards righting the wrongs I’ve done in my life.”

 

As for Khamisa, he looks back on his decision to forgive Hicks with gratitude and recognizes how forgiveness provided much needed healing for not only himself, but Hicks and his grandfather.

 

“I’ve taken on a fatherly role with Tony because his father was not in his life back then,” says Khamisa, who says they get together often outside of work, including for meals. "I love Tony. His grandfather is as close to me as my own brother. We are very much a family.”

 

“I really think that our families’ lives were meant to cross,” says Tasreen. “I think Tariq and Tony both came here for a really big purpose to teach the world. My brother was a beautiful soul, a beautiful person. He was just one of those really old souls, wise souls from a very young age. He always said he was going to make a difference in the world – and you should leave the world a better place than you found it.”