Jamie Joins
On Aug. 1, 2009—around the time LaRose found her bargain ticket to Europe—a 31-year-old woman sat before a laptop at her mother’s kitchen table in the remote town of Leadville, Colo.
Jamie Paulin Ramirez felt stifled. Her young son, Christian, bounded past every now and then, and her nosy mother kept making excuses to stroll by.
As discreetly as she could, Ramirez tried to shield the screen. She and her mom had clashed about her conversion to Islam. It wasn’t that her mother objected to the religion; she had married a Muslim herself. She just thought her daughter was overzealous.
Ramirez feared her mom would launch into a tirade if she caught her chatting with her new Muslim friends, just as her mother criticized her for wearing a head scarf, or hijab.
“When I would pray she would scream at me,” Ramirez recalled in a document reviewed by Reuters. “When I would wear my hijab to work and to the store, she would say it was embarrassing.”
One of Ramirez’s new online friends was another recent convert to Islam, a woman from Pennsylvania who sometimes called herself Jihad Jane. They seemed a lot alike—they were both white, blonde, Americans. And each had gravitated toward Muslim men in Europe, including one man in Ireland. He had been trying to persuade Ramirez to bring her son and join him there.
On this day, Jihad Jane wrote with big news: “Soon, I will be leaving for Europe to be with other brothers & sisters. When I get to Europe, I will send for you to come be there with me… This place will be like a training camp as well as a home.”
“I would love to go over there,” Ramirez replied.
Their chat turned to politics. And, years later, the brief exchange that followed would become part of the government’s case against both of them.
Jihad Jane: “When our brothers defend our faith their homes, they are terrorist. Fine, then I am a terrorist and proud to be this.”
Ramirez: “That’s right … If that’s how they call it, then so be it. I am what I am.”
Ramirez was raised a Methodist, but she had become embittered toward God and abandoned religion years earlier following her sister’s death from cancer.
Thrice divorced, Ramirez had moved in with her mother to save money. But they quarreled often, especially about her young son – what he should read, how he should pray, what he should eat for dinner, whether he should wear his hair short or long.
Ramirez had been looking for a reason to leave.
Her turn toward Islam had begun the year before, while researching a paper for a college class. Intrigued by what she learned about the religion, she continued reading. After a few months, she slipped down to a Denver-area mosque and converted.
Now, her new, nonjudgmental friends on Islamic forums were enticing her to join them. The man in Ireland – the one Jihad Jane knew as Black Flag — pressed Ramirez hardest.
Ramirez knew the man only by his real name, Ali Damache, and in his latest message to her, he persisted: Bring your son. Marry me. I will teach you Arabic and the mystical beauty of the Koran.
Ramirez hesitated. Men had burned her so many times. She liked what she knew of Damache. He was nice – he complimented her on the color schemes of her hijabs. Even so….
Damache urged her to ask Allah for guidance. Pray for a week, each night before bedtime, he said, then consider the colors of the dreams: If the dreams come in white or green, it is a sign that she should to fly to Ireland with her son; if the dreams come in red or black, she and her son should stay in Colorado.
Ramirez struggled to recall her dreams, but it wouldn’t matter. Damache told her he had prayed, too, and his dreams were glowing green – the color of Islam, and of Ireland.
OK, Ramirez agreed, that must be a sign from Allah. She began shopping for two plane tickets to Ireland.
The Passports
In the weeks leading up to her own flight to Europe, LaRose grew excited about what lay ahead.
Finally, she would meet some true Muslims—men more righteous than she was, people wholly committed to the cause. They would teach her to pray and the ways of Allah. More important, they would accept her as one of their own.
It would be an honor to fly to Amsterdam for training, then travel on to Sweden to carry out the killing.
Her instructions: to shoot the artist Vilks six times in the chest. “That way,” LaRose recalls today, “they know it was not an accident. It was intended.”
A short while before her flight, LaRose stole her boyfriend’s passport and birth certificate, presumably to provide false identification for the terrorists. LaRose located two of the boyfriend’s passports, one current and one expired, as well as several birth certificates.
Following her handler’s instructions, LaRose mailed everything to young Khalid near Baltimore.
Then, days before the flight to Amsterdam and the start of her new life, the realities of her old one intervened: Her boyfriend’s father suffered a heart attack. Soon after, he died.
LaRose wasn’t deterred. She let her al-Qaida associates know she was still coming. “I will be away from here in a couple days,” she wrote. “Then … I will get to work on important matters.”
Within hours, LaRose heard a knock on the door of her home near Philadelphia.
The FBI had returned. This time, LaRose answered.
HOW THE SERIES WAS REPORTED:
JANE’S JIHAD is based on six months of reporting in Pennsylvania, Texas, Maryland, Colorado, Washington, D.C., and Ireland. The accounts, including the thoughts and actions of characters in the stories, are based on court records and other documents, many of them confidential, as well as interviews with people involved in the case. Reporter John Shiffman gained exclusive access to those documents and individuals. Many spoke only on condition of anonymity. In Ireland, the law forbids the government and defense lawyers from commenting until court proceedings are completed. In the United States, prosecutors do not typically comment before sentencing. The Reuters interview with Colleen LaRose, the woman who called herself Jihad Jane, is the only one she has granted. This is Part 2; click here for Part 1 of the series.
© 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.
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