“The only way they
spiritual group and had recently given a short talk to a Muslim women’s group about the sacredness of every single life, including those of animals—which is why she tried to be a vegetarian although sometimes fell short. She joked that she was a “slackaterian” or “vegetrying.”
“My heart—and I speak for many of our friends—my heart has been breaking,” says Tabatha Robinson, who met Mattis through Prep for Prep and has just graduated from Harvard Law. When Robinson was a teenager, Mattis would travel from Princeton to her New Jersey high school to watch her ballet recitals because she’d confessed to him her dream of becoming a ballerina. “What college boy shows up at their friend’s high-school ballet recitals?” She starts to cry. “Forty-five years to life? Are you kidding me? I want a world in which our sentencing doesn’t look like this.”
Mattis and Rahman are not, nor have they ever been, a couple, their friends say. The press is painting the night of May 29 as this “weird Bonnie and Clyde situation,” says someone close to Rahman. “It’s so freaking ridiculous. Colin is like a cute, lovable baby.” What Mattis and Rahman do share are life circumstances that set them apart from their friends, most of whom were raised with more privilege. Each of them lost parents comparatively young. Rahman’s father died suddenly when she was 23; Mattis’s died in a stabbing on St. Vincent when he was in law school, and his mother, a powerful presence in his life—and a fervent Christian—died last summer. So they both know early grief and loss, and as the responsible, high-achieving adult children of immigrant parents, they stepped in to shoulder more than their share of the family obligations, while their peers were far more carefree. Rahman looked after her mother, doing the shopping and ferrying her to doctor’s appointments. Mattis took over the raising of his mother’s three foster children after her death. Their relationship is more “like brother and sister,” says Salmah Rizvi, who co-hosted the birthday party where they met. “Like, they take care of each other.”
It was the fall of 2014 when Rahman and Mattis became friends, in the wake of Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s deaths, the year after the birth of Black Lives Matter. Rizvi had gotten close to Rahman that summer when they traveled together on a law-student fellowship to Israel and Palestine. Most law students start looking for jobs between their second and third years, and an alignment with Palestinian human rights could have been regarded by some as a career-risking move. Upon arriving in Israel, Rahman was stopped and questioned at Ben-Gurion International Airport for more than four hours; already, she was steeped in the language of social justice and racial politics, friends say. All summer long, as race-related antipolice uprisings spread across the U.S. and the Israeli military bombed homes in Gaza, the parallels between the American Black struggle and Palestinian oppression were a topic of conver