Mickey Norris, HOA president of Saddlebrook subdivision, walks through his neighbourhood, an outgrowth of Atlanta's sprawl along State Route 400. Photo / The Washington Post
Mickey Norris, HOA president of Saddlebrook subdivision, walks through his neighbourhood, an outgrowth of Atlanta's sprawl along State Route 400. Photo / The Washington Post
It was late afternoon in a subdivision an hour north of Atlanta when the chop of one helicopter, then another, began startling neighbours out of their weekday routines.
A man firing up his patio grill realised it wasn't the usual medevac swooping toward the hospital.
A retiree settling down to dinner went out front to see.
A woman driving home from work saw the black helicopters from a distance, and as she got closer, realised they were hovering above her very own neighbourhood, a huddle of beige houses, trimmed lawns and still-young maples called Saddlebrook.
Soon, homeowners were standing in front yards up and down Horseshoe Creek Lane and Walking Horse Trail, watching as patrol cars, black SUVs and FBI agents surrounded a house on the corner, the one with a shed in the back and a welcome wreath on the front door.
Text messages and phone calls began flying. It was Maria Taheb's house. It was something involving her 21-year old son, Hasher, who used to speed through the neighbourhood. He was being charged with plotting to blow up the White House. A "martyrdom operation", as he allegedly described it to undercover agents. According to officials, he had been trying to buy grenades and a shoulder-fired antitank rocket when he was arrested in the parking lot of a Lowe's, 20 minutes away.
Now the neighbours watched in the day's last light as officers hauled away a computer and other items from the house in boxes and black duffel bags.
They watched as the patrol cars drove away, and the helicopters flew off, and as quiet returned to the neighbourhood on a Wednesday in January, there were all kinds of questions, including how their middle-class subdivision would react at a moment when American anger seemed to be rising, divisions seemed to be deepening and the fullest range of reactions seemed possible.
The president of the homeowners association, Mickey Norris, was in Florida for business and began getting messages as worry spread about the prospect of co-conspirators, drive-by vigilantes and sinking property values, as well as about Taheb, who was in the house alone, the blinds shut, not saying anything about what happened.
He decided to schedule a meeting for as soon as he got back, and sent out a message: "The Board has received numerous calls expressing concern for the unsettling events of this week in our community ... Deputy Sheriff Beival will join us for a called Neighbourhood Watch meeting this weekend ... Mickey and Allason's home ... Wildflower Court, Sunday afternoon, 2pm."
Part of Atlanta's sprawl
His house was one of 137 arranged on medium-sized lots carved into a swath of maple, oak and sycamore trees in Forsyth County, a place once known for being a rural, whites-only haven policed by the Ku Klux Klan.
Lynchings and other violence drove out nearly every black family from the county in 1912, and the threat of violence kept it almost entirely white into the 1980s, when civil rights marchers faced down white crowds hurling bottles and circling in pickup trucks flying Confederate flags. Meanwhile, the new State Route 400 was delivering Atlanta's sprawl farther and farther north. By the time ground was broken for Saddlebrook in 2012, the area was known less for its history than for being Exit 14, the latest blank slate in a borderland that was in every way transitioning from one version of the South to whatever was coming next.
Mickey Norris, HOA president of the Saddlebrook subdivision, stands in front of a pile of mulch. Photo / Washington Post
Politically it was part of Georgia's 7th Congressional District, which was mostly white and mostly Republican, though those majorities were slipping. The GOP incumbent who'd won in the past with more than 60 per cent of the vote had won by fewer than 500 votes in the 2018 midterm election. Democrats now vying for the seat included a Latina, an Asian American and a daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants.
Geographically, it was 10 minutes from a Target. It was a turn from a shady two-lane road past an old church cemetery and a leftover field with two goats. There was a clubhouse and pool. The houses were light beige or dark beige, greyish beige or greenish beige, 280 and 380sq m homes with covenant-enforced lawns. The floor plans had names such as Hunter and Packard, Kingston and Gentry. When Norris and his wife decided to downsize from a gated community nearby, they got a Jefferson.
Theirs was on a little hill on a cul-de-sac, and as Saddlebrook began filling up, Norris made it a point to meet his neighbours.
There were young families, corporate transfers, tech-sector managers and empty nesters.
They were from Florida, Indiana, California, New Jersey and a few exits down the highway. Most were white, but Norris had noticed the demographics shifting. There was an African American couple next door, several Indian American families around and others like Maria Taheb, who Norris guessed was "Middle Eastern," as he put it, though he did not know from which specific country and could not say he cared as long as the grass stayed cut.
"Almost what you'd call a typical American community," was how he described Saddlebrook.
Norris considered himself an independent, the variety of Trump supporter who said he did not like a lot of the President's rhetoric but liked the unbridled economy.
He grew up in a rural, mostly white town in the early stages of suburban Atlanta engulfment. He had a relative he described as a die-hard racist, and he always compared himself favourably to that extreme.
He considered himself adaptable to change.
The Mickey Norris ideal was a "colourblind" world where racial identities no longer mattered, including his own. He figured the defining feature of his character was not that he was born into a white male majority but that he was born with weak bones, which forced him to overcome constant injuries, which taught him to "deal or cave", a principle he applied in the egalitarian manner of a person who believed everyone had the same shot in America.
The diversity in Saddlebrook was to him the living proof.
He was vice-president of sales for a medical software company, and when he wasn't on the road he worked from home wearing a wireless earbud, troubleshooting client problems as he paced around his living room, looking out at the woods with a sense of wellbeing.
He was goal-oriented, and had almost accomplished his big one, "retire by age 50".
The other, "spend time improving community", was a work in progress. He had instituted events such as the annual mulching of the nature trail, and that was how he'd met Taheb, who'd also come to the chilli cook-off by the pool and other events, always wearing a hijab. Norris found himself revisiting these interactions as he planned the Sunday meeting.
His wife, Allason, was nervous that holding it at their house might make them a target for troublemakers. Norris had heard that someone had already called Taheb and asked her when she was selling her house.
He worried people would say "her culture caused it to happen", that the whole thing would turn into "white versus nonwhite", and be "damaging to the community spirit".
And as he began checking his email to see who was planning to attend, he saw a message from Taheb, asking if she could come.
'Secret liberal society'
After the police left, George Biscan, a widower and retired steelworker from DeMotte, Indiana, went back inside to his dinner. He usually left the front and back porch doors open to get the cross-breeze but now he did something he had hardly ever done since moving to Saddlebrook. He locked them. Then he felt strange for having done so.
He turned on 11Alive news and heard more details. That Taheb's son had gone to local public schools. That undercover FBI agents had been monitoring him and said they finally helped him find a weapons dealer, sell his car to finance the purchase, and rent the car he had allegedly planned to drive to Washington to attack the White House, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and a synagogue.
"That's how terrorists operate," Biscan recalled thinking. "They stay here for a long time. They blend in. They don't go around carrying a flag."
Retired steelworker George Biscan stands in a doorway at his Saddlebrook home. Photo / Washington Post
He scrolled through his mental file of what he knew about Muslims.
There was 9/11, which he'd watched on television from a golf resort in Florida. There were TV shows and movies, which were "always negative, like, we got to kill all the infidels and all that stuff".
Biscan had voted for Donald Trump for the same reason he voted for Barack Obama -"not a politician"- and had not always known what to think when he heard Trump say things like "I think Islam hates us".
He'd regularly worked and played on softball teams with African Americans and Latinos at Inland Steel, and his old subdivision had Croatian and Serbian immigrants. He'd never known any Muslims until he realised he did - Taheb.
He conjured the few times he'd chatted with her through a car window. He remembered her saying she worked off Exit 11. He noticed that she wore a name tag, and the headscarf. He thought she was a single mum. He remembered seeing her son a few times, speeding past the pool down Horseshoe Creek Lane, all of which led Biscan to another thought, that her son was "just a hotheaded kid talking big whose life is now ruined over some stupid thing he never was going to get away with anyway".
As he toggled between these thoughts, he began to worry about whether his neighbours were as fair-minded as he considered himself to be. He started making a point of passing by Taheb's house when he was out walking his dog. He checked her front door and the siding to make sure "some yahoo" hadn't painted it with graffiti. He eyed the windows to make sure "some yo-yo" hadn't thrown a brick.
Down the street, Jeff LaMore, who had been on his back patio grilling when the helicopters appeared, found his initial alarm mollified as he read the criminal complaint describing how Taheb's son had used code words like "potato" for grenades and "spicy pepper" for an AT-4, and ended some messages with "lol". It seemed to him a version of juvenile delinquency.
"I just know when I was 21, I did some really dumb s---. Like speeding, or drinking and driving, or getting radicalised by Islam," he joked.
He was 44 and had moved with his wife, Jamie, and their daughter to Saddlebrook for the good public schools and affordable square footage. They liked to say that their section of Walking Horse Trail was the "secret liberal society", home to those who embraced the idea of a changing South. In a precinct where Trump won with 65 per cent of the vote, they assumed Saddlebrook had Trump-supporting homeowners who felt differently, perhaps emboldened.
"If anyone is going to show their ignorance, it's going to be now," LaMore recalled thinking.
Jamie LaMore remembered a conversation with a parent from a different neighbourhood who said he had dealt with "these people" before, referring to Muslims. She heard a neighbour complain that Saddlebrook was turning into "another Saybrook", a reference to a nearby subdivision that she said was almost completely non-white.
LaMore felt increasingly self-aware that he was a "big, bald white guy who drives a truck in Forsyth County". as he put it, and that people must assume he supported Trump. In fact, he had reached the point where he was no longer simply repulsed by what he considered the President's divisive, racist and dishonest character; he was repulsed by people who tolerated it.
"It's gotten to where, well, I judge you now," he said.
He worked at a health care company one cubicle away from a colleague named Mohammed and was always trying to telegraph that he did not "secretly hate him" by chatting about mundane things like TV shows and movies they liked.
When he got Norris' message about the meeting, LaMore decided that he would speak up if someone got out of line or tried to recruit him into some unspoken white alliance.
"I'll definitely be the vocal a--hole," he told himself. Jamie LaMore said: "If it goes down, I'm ready."
It was that kind of edginess that was troubling Tom and Alice Evans, who lived across the street from Taheb. He was a retired engineer and self-described "grumpy old man from New Jersey" who spoke a touch of Mandarin and Italian. She was a retired flight attendant from northern Virginia who described her late father as "very prejudiced" and who had vowed at a young age, "I'll never live my life like that, ever."
After the police had left, they went back inside their house, where the living room was decorated with landscape paintings and the crafts Alice brought back from China, Japan and the other places she used to fly.
They turned on the news, which they rarely watched anymore because it struck them as so "negative," so "anti-Trump".
They had both voted for Trump, who they saw as a "flawed" President who deep down "truly loves his country and wants the best for it".
By contrast, they considered all the frank talk about race and racism during Obama's time in office "divisive".
As they saw it, the country had been degenerating ever since into a place where "everything is racial," and people seemed "angry all the time" and "at each other's throats" and now they watched the latest report on what had happened in Saddlebrook, which had seemed like a refuge from all that.
They were relieved that no one had been hurt. But soon Tom Evans began worrying about people he called "the Bubbas from rural Georgia" and the "mental midgets".
"Are we going to have idiots in pickup trucks driving around?" he wondered.
No time for suspicion
Alice Evans called her two sons to reassure them that the situation wasn't as scary as the news had probably made it seem. She made banana bread for the reporters staking out Horseshoe Creek Lane. As the days went on, she went back to gardening, babysitting and all the activities she had busied herself with since retiring.
She had been a flight attendant for more than 40 years, including on September 11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks.
She had been working a flight from Germany to the United States, and had been diverted to Canada, where law enforcement whisked away two passengers as she was consoling everyone else on the flight.
Later that day, she learned that two of her dearest colleagues had been on the hijacked flight that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, which still made her cry when she talked about it.
She had gone back to work immediately, and life became a blur of courses in self-defence, detecting suspicious packages, and multicultural sensitivities, where she learned not to be alarmed if a Muslim passenger prayed on board. She began working flights to Dubai and Kuwait, and said she never had the time or inclination to become uniformly suspicious of Muslims.
"I thought, 'Alice, do all Muslims hate America? Are all Catholics against birth control?' " and she kept working until she and her husband retired to Saddlebrook, where they liked "the newness".
"It's good because you're alone, and when you're alone you're a little vulnerable, and you need someone to talk to," said Tom Evans, who had met his neighbours from India and their son, Rudra.
"They said, 'People call him Rudy. I said, 'Well, if his name is Rudra, that's what I'll call him.' I will make the effort, or just let me write it down. I'm a visual learner."
Alice Evans had met so many neighbours when she was out gardening, including Taheb across the street, and now she could not stop thinking about her. Alice Evans had taught Taheb how to plant and edge her grass.
Taheb had donated items for one of Evans' charity drives.
They had chatted at the chilli cook-off, when Evans remembered Taheb's "delicious vegetarian version".
Evans knew Taheb's husband had died, and that she had three children, two of whom no longer lived with her.
She pictured her alone over there.
She pictured her picturing her son in jail.
"I thought, 'I'm a mother of two boys,' " Evans recalled. "I thought, 'Imagine. Just imagine what she is going through. Imagine a child has been with you for nine months. I don't know. I don't know'."
She had Taheb's phone number. She did not want to be intrusive, but she did not want to be cold.
So she texted her - "Maria, our prayers are with you and your family as well" - and thought about what else she could do.
Over on Wildflower Court, Norris was conferring with the other board members about Taheb's request to attend the meeting.
He worried it might descend into a "bash Maria session".
Someone else worried that neighbours would not feel free to ask certain questions if Taheb were there, such as whether she had been involved in some way.
Candace Caldwell listened.
She was a teacher whose father used to make her debate him across the dinner table, always forcing her to take a position opposite her own opinion. She argued that Taheb was a homeowner and had every right to be there.
"It's not an invitation-only party," she said. "If we exclude her, what would stop someone from keeping us out next?"
The board agreed, and one afternoon before the meeting, Caldwell walked the neighbourhood passing out fliers reminding people it was happening. At one house, a man standing in his yard told her that he thought Taheb should leave Saddlebrook.
"It's not safe for her," Caldwell recalled him saying.
He sounded so confident that she thought he probably assumed she agreed with him.
"She owns the house," she told him sharply, and kept going, putting fliers in every mailbox including the one belonging to Taheb, and when Sunday arrived, Caldwell said she felt nervous. "Nervous to find out what kind of people we were," she would explain later.
Standing room only
Norris set out bottles of water and biscuits on the breakfast bar, which opened to the living room, where two windows overlooked the community nature trail.
At 2pm, people began arriving. They sat on the couch and the love seat, on the 12 dining chairs and eight card-table chairs Norris had brought up from the basement and angled toward the fireplace.
More people kept arriving, including Taheb.
Recounting it later, Norris said she arrived alone.
She sat in a high-back chair by the breakfast bar, and as more people came they filled in all the chairs except the one next to her, which Jamie LaMore noticed when she arrived.
She made a point of sitting there. Her husband, Jeff, decided to stand in the kitchen so he could see the crowd, reminding himself "don't get personal" as he imagined what people might say.
Caldwell stood nearby, scanning the faces of neighbours, many of whom did not yet realise the woman in the hijab was Taheb because her attendance had not been announced.
Soon, it was standing room only in the living room, kitchen, dining room and all the way past the Norris family photos into the foyer. When Biscan arrived, he posted himself by the front door in case something happened. Outside, three sheriff's department cars were parking along the cul-de-sac. Once the sheriff and two deputies were inside, Norris stood in front of the fireplace.
He thanked people for coming. He introduced the sheriff, who said there was only so much he could say about the investigation since everyone in the room was a "potential juror".
He said he was confident Taheb's son was acting alone.
He said that Saddlebrook was safe thanks partly to a tip that had come from "the community" and that if anyone saw something, they should say something.
And as he and the deputies continued, Taheb listened, and Norris watched her listening, wondering how she must be feeling and whether what he was about to do was a huge mistake.
When the deputies finished, he stood up, thanked everyone for coming and said there was one more speaker.
"Like it or not, all of us are here in this neighbourhood together - it's like you can't choose your family," he remembered saying, and gesturing toward Taheb.
"Maria is here with us," he said, and people turned to look at her. She waved. Up to this point, she had not said anything publicly about what had happened. Now Norris said that she wanted "to say a few words to the community", and she stood at the front of the room by the fireplace and began talking to her neighbours about her son.
She said he had got involved with the wrong crowd.
She said he had made poor choices.
She said she did not know what to do and that she was "devastated".
She started to suggest that her son may have been entrapped, and as she did LaMore silently hoped she would stop, thinking "no, no, no, not with this crowd," and Taheb said she was not trying to make excuses.
She tried to collect herself. She said she was a "good person." She said she was "lost". She said "I'm sorry", and when she was finished, Norris asked if there were any questions.
Hasher Jallal Taheb, a 21-year-old man resident of the Saddlebrook community, was arrested in January 2019 for threatening to blow up the White House. Photo / Forsyth County Sheriff's Office
LaMore looked around the living room. It was quiet. No one said anything. He noticed a few people were trying not to cry, including Norris, who stood up and thanked people for coming, deciding there was "nothing left to say".
People began standing and heading toward the door. Taheb gathered herself to leave. And in the moment of transition, Norris watched a woman walk over to Taheb and say something. He watched the woman give Taheb a hug. He saw the LaMores come over and introduce themselves.
"If there's anything we can do," Jeff LaMore said.
He saw Caldwell tell Taheb how brave she thought she was, and soon there was an informal line of people forming to greet her, including Biscan, who could tell that Taheb was having trouble holding herself together.
When his turn came, he reminded her that they had met before, and that he had heard she might be a beautician, and that his late wife was a beautician, too. Then he reached out and held her hand, and he felt her squeeze it, and they stayed like that for a moment as more people said hello and lingered a while, eating the biscuits and drinking the water they had left untouched until now.
A few months later, another message went out to the residents of Saddlebrook, this time in the form of a sign planted in the grass by the pool: "Pine Straw Day, 10am. Front Entrance. All help any time welcome!!"
The annual spreading of the pine straw was a spring ritual in Saddlebrook, and on a Saturday morning in May, a dozen or so neighbours showed up including Norris, the Evanses, Biscan, George, Jeff LaMore and, for a while, Taheb, who was still on the landscaping committee.
It was an overcast day, and she and everyone else helped toss bales off the back of Norris' truck. They pitchforked the pine straw around the snapdragons and verbena by the Saddlebrook sign. They fluffed it around the pool, and at this first community gathering since the meeting at Norris' house, no one talked about what had happened.
Not Taheb, whose son remained jailed without bond on a charge of attempting to damage and destroy a federal building "by means of fire and an explosive". Not Taheb, who did not have some speech prepared about how the true character of the neighbourhood had been revealed.
Privately, though, they'd all been thinking about how well things had gone.
"There was nothing like 'get the f out of our neighbourhood,' " Jeff LaMore said one afternoon, still amazed.
"I was kind of shocked, knowing we live in a county that has that history."
"Nothing came out negative," said Biscan on another afternoon, sitting in his living room, doors open, enjoying a cross-breeze.
"Honestly, I was proud of us," said Caldwell, heading to pick up her son from school on a day when the regular routines of suburban life had resumed in Saddlebrook, along with their continuing worries about the world beyond the front entrance.
"I think this neighbourhood is an anomaly," said LaMore one afternoon.
"The whole world is in freakin' turmoil," was how Tom Evans still saw things.
Biscan imagined chaos sweeping the country in the coming years.
"I don't see it being bullets," he said. "I see it being a mass uprising or something."
Inside Saddlebrook, though, nothing felt so apocalyptic. The seasonal flags were flapping on front porches, fresh pansies were planted around mailboxes, and it was a good day for the spreading of the pine straw. They all kept at it, chatting about their allergies and whether the rain was going to hold off.
The Saddlebrook subdivision, north of Atlanta. Photo / Washington Post
"You've got to see my vegetable garden," Biscan said to a neighbour.
"Good morning, Maria," LaMore said when he saw her.
Tom Evans wiped sweat off his face. "Mrs Evans, I'm done," he said to his wife, who was deep in a flower bed.
"Go home, have a beer, relax," a neighbour told him.
Norris checked over the work, making sure the pine straw was evenly distributed around the flowers at the entrance and by the pool, then he stopped for a moment and looked around at what his middle-class American subdivision was becoming.
"We've still got to do the far end of the neighbourhood - we got the hill and the first house on the left," he said, and kept working.
When he noticed that the sky looked like rain, he picked up the pace, hauling a few leftover bales down to yards for people to spread around their gardens.
He cranked the leaf blower, clearing off the footpaths and pool deck, and soon, Pine Straw Day 2019 was over. He got back into his truck and drove home, passing six "For Sale" signs along the way, which he said was not unusual for the end of the school year.
He was optimistic that property values would hold, and one Sunday, a steady and diverse stream of people toured an open house down the street, a yellow-beige Heritage.
"This is the dining room, and the formal living room ..." the agent told a potential buyer.
