Heroes from different worlds
POLICE OFFICER AND SIKH TEMPLE PRESIDENT BATTLED GUNMAN IN WISCONSIN AT COST OF THEIR LIVES
They couldn’t have come from two more different worlds: One of them, Lt Brian Murphy, a classic New York-style cop with more than two decades on the streets. The other, Satwant Singh Kaleka, a deeply religious native of India who came to the US as an impoverished immigrant and made his way up buying gas stations.
Yet here they were, both cut to the ground and shedding blood at different parts of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin on Sunday. Both had come up against the gunman whose murderous path ultimately left six people dead. Murphy was armed with a police weapon, Kaleka with a knife. Both paid dearly, Kaleka with his life, Murphy nearly so — he lies critically wounded in a hospital, but is expected to survive.
The pain of tragedy seems always to be accompanied by a search for a compensating story of courage. The public has seized on Murphy and Kaleka as the heroes, their desperate bids to halt the gunman’s rampage being told and retold in community halls, in newspapers and on talk radio shows.
FBI agents hugged Kaleka’s son before telling him how his 65-year-old father had confronted the much younger gunman with the knife, keeping him away from his wife and other temple followers. The Sikh community started a Facebook page for “Sikhs expressing EXTREME gratitude to Lt Brian Murphy” in appreciation for urging fellow officers to help the wounded inside the temple despite having been shot nine times at close range. “You are a selfless hero,” wrote Simi Burn Bassett.
Amardeep S. Kaleka, 34, said his father had always believed strongly that America was going to be a place of new opportunities for him, his wife and his two boys when he arrived from India’s Punjab region and settled in Milwaukee in the early 1980s. He got a job working at a family member’s gas station, Kaleka said. “He started working a third shift for an uncle and worked his butt off, 16, 18 hours a day. Then he went on to rent one, and then to own one, and at the end, he owned something like eight gas stations .... All with hard work. No tricks. Hard work.”
Kaleka chastised his sons whenever they complained about discrimination or ill treatment, Amardeep said. He said his father used much of his earnings from the gas stations to build the new Sikh temple, which opened in July 2007.
On the day of the attacks, Kaleka said, his father went to the temple much earlier than usual. Law enforcement agents told him a trail of blood led toward the kitchen from where the temple president confronted the gunman, suggesting Kaleka’s knife may have wounded the attacker, though this has not been confirmed. Kaleka’s wife was hiding in terror in a pantry.