The same week that Kate Grosmaire visited the hospital where her 18-year-old daughter lay in a coma from a gunshot wound to the head, she visited the jail where the shooter was being held by police.
Even before they took Ann off life support, the Grosmaires knew wanted to forgive her murderer, her high school boyfriend Conor McBride.
“Conor has said that act could not have been anything but from God because people alone can’t do that; it has to be from God,” said Kate, who still talks to McBride on the phone once a week. “That was the start of his salvation.”
Since Ann’s death in 2010, Kate and husband Andy Grosmaire have become advocates for an approach to criminal punishment called restorative justice. In their daughter’s murder case, the Catholic couple learned they could push for lighter charges than life in prison.
Before the trial, the Grosmaires and McBrides sat down with community representatives and a public defender to talk with 19-year-old Conor about his sentence. Because of their initiative, he never went to trial and ultimately took a plea deal for 20 years with 10 years of probation along with anger management classes, volunteering, and speaking on teen dating violence.
After their story was featured in The New York Times Magazine, “we had people come up to us and say that they wanted to forgive others because of our example,” said Kate, who recently released a book exploring their family’s story, Forgiving My Daughter’s Killer. “We knew that we wanted to share that message with a wider audience.”
Kate spoke with assistant editor Morgan Lee about why they sought out this alternative route in the justice system and Christian forgiveness as a way of life.
What does restorative justice offer?
In our current criminal justice system, the victim and offender are kept as apart as far as possible. We were told if at all possible we wouldn’t have to come to court and that we wouldn’t have to see Conor. There’s just this huge separation. On the other side of that, the offender is counseled never to admit guilt, not to say anything to anyone ever. In this case, even though Conor had confessed, he pled not guilty. It’s just the way things have to happen.
In our situation, we were allowed to see Conor, and he was allowed to tell us that he was sorry. How many times is the offender sorry for what they have done, but they are not allowed the opportunity to express that to their victims? The current system doesn’t allow them to see their victim as a human being. Restorative justice encourages empathy, but our current justice system is all about punishment for the crime, not about connecting the community.
What does restorative justice ask of the victim’s side?
It can be scary. It’s easy to sit in a room and listen to the district attorney say that they will take care of everything for you. But we wanted to be able to participate in this as much as we could. We wanted our voice to be heard.
How many, 90 percent of court cases, are resolved through a plea bargain? People may suspect that this will go to court and the offender will have the maximum sentence possible, but what actually happens is that (with plea deals) the victims don’t have a voice or have a say.
In a restorative justice process, you will be able to face the offender and tell him how this crime impacted your life. You will also be able to have a say in what you think is a reasonable and fair sentence for the offender.
Do you think that having the victim’s family involved in the process makes the punishment arbitrary?
The current system is arbitrary! In many instances, it comes down to how good of a lawyer you could afford. Only 10 percent of the cases go to court—and then those are heard in front of a jury of 6 to 12 people who will decide the innocence of others. So how is this any less arbitrary than having the people who are impacted by the crime sitting in the room and talking about a meaningful sentence?
People say a lot of times that I, as a victim, shouldn’t be involved because we have an emotional stake in the game, but I’m like, Who better than the victim and the community affected by the crime? These are the people who really understand the impact of what is happening.
You write that you had to forgive your daughter. What did you mean by that?
It wasn’t just one thing that happened that day. It wasn’t just that Conor pulled the trigger and shot Ann. They were arguing, and she left the house and got in the car and was going to leave. … I needed to forgive her for being in that emotional place and for being 19 and not having the skills to stop arguing and just leave.
Who taught you what forgiveness was?
Andy and I both served in the healing ministry in our church, where we quickly learned that this wasn’t just sitting down with people and praying. I saw over and over again how forgiveness has changed people’s lives. I also started applying it in my own life in bigger and bigger ways.
I practiced a lot on my husband. I realized that in order to save my marriage, I had to forgive him and continually forgive him and accept as the man that God created and chose for me to share my life with. When [Ann died], I thought I know what forgiveness will do. I know I need to forgive Conor because I know the peace that will be on the other side of it. I just had to work through whatever emotional barriers there were.
In the book you write, “Forgiveness is a lifestyle.” What does that mean?
Once you start forgiving, you realize how freeing it is. Whenever somebody does something, I think, I need to forgive. I want to forgive; let me find that place of forgiveness. In the Gospels, Peter asks Jesus “How many times do I have to forgive?” and Jesus says “Seventy times seven.” God knows that we live in a world where people are going to do things that don’t make us happy or hurt us in some way, but he knows the power of forgiveness and that we have to live with that at the forefront our minds every day to stay in his peace.
After you shared your story nationally, many people wrote you to share personal examples of how their own lives had been changed. How did you respond to their stories?
Right after the book came out, I got a Facebook message from a woman whose daughter was killed by her boyfriend in a murder-suicide. It had been a year since her daughter’s murder and people had been giving her books about grief, but she told me that this was the first book that she could relate to. She didn’t say anything about being able to forgive; she just said that it brought her comfort. I thought, “If this is the only person that God had wanted for me to reach out, than it would be okay.” The wonderful thing about it is that there’s just so many more people.
How did your understanding of God change after Ann’s death?
I considered how powerful God is and how amazing his grace is in our life that he could allow me to forgive Conor and live at peace with regards to what happened. I’ve never gotten angry with God. … Maybe I have, [but] it’s not like I was angry with God about this happening, like why did you let this happen? I more so felt that he was right there with me, caring for me. I never felt that he deserted me. I’ve thought about how nothing is impossible with God, and then turned that around to consider that everything is possible with God.
In many ways, it’s unbelievable that you and Andy were on the same page in deciding to forgive Conor. Was it like this for the rest of your family?
On my side of the family, there was a lot of acceptance. At first, Andy’s sister Teresa could not understand why we would forgive Conor. One Sunday at church, however, they read 2 Corinthians 2, where Paul is telling the Corinthians that if someone has done something wrong and you forgive them in Christ, I must forgive them as well. When she read that, it struck her, “If Kate and Andy have forgiven Conor, I need to forgive him as well.”
Tell me about the relationship that your mother struck up with Conor’s mother, Julie McBride.
When my brother was 12 years old, he accidentally shot and killed his best friend. My family had briefly gone to counseling about this, but it really was never talked about. My mother had had no one to share that experience with and actually denied knowing anything about it to people whom she met later in life. Later, when she met Julie, they had this shared bond of their sons using a gun to shoot, and could talk about something that no one else would be able to understand. You could try and say to them, “I understand,” but they had gone through the same experience.
Is there anything that you would like to challenge our readers with?
There are two things that people misunderstand about forgiveness. The first thing is that forgiveness is a pardon. We don’t pardon Conor for what he has done. When you forgive someone, it only means that you aren’t expecting him to pay back that debt. In the Lord’s Prayer sometimes we say, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtor.” Conor gave us a debt he could never repay. We gave that debt to God and asked him to be the one to collect that. That freed us from needing Conor to satisfy that debt for us.
The second misunderstanding about forgiveness is that it’s reconciliation. But you can forgive someone even if they’re not sorry. It just means that you’re not expecting to collect that debt. But if they’re not sorry for what they’ve done and they’re not promising to be a better person and not do that harm again, you’re not obligated to have a relationship with them. If Conor wasn’t sorry for what he’d done, we wouldn’t be corresponding with him or talking to him every week. We can forgive people who have hurt us and who will continue to hurt us—we just don’t have to be in a relationship with them.
