An Eye for an Eye . . .

BODEGA BAY — This was last Thursday morning. For a few hours at least, the North Coast of California was between storms. Sunlight splashed through the plate-glass window of the oceanside home of Reg and Meg Green. Outside, the Pacific was calm, ruffled only by a slight breeze. Inside, the Greens were calm as well, despite the topic of conversation, which happened to be the murder of their son.

Only a week earlier, in a faraway courtroom, a jury had acquitted two men suspected of killing 7-year-old Nicholas Green, and those who have not followed the high-profile case might expect to find the parents howling with rage, demanding justice, closure.

Instead, the father said simply that the evidence was circumstantial and, besides, “victims are bad judges.” Instead, the mother added: “I think it is right that courts be balanced toward the accused, that they require enough proof. It is important not to send innocent people to jail. The jurors sat through that trial for 11 months. I’m sure they heard a lot of evidence.”

The reaction is typical of the Greens. From the beginning, their response to an utterly awful act--”something out of the blackness,” as Reg Green put it--has been both moving and provocative. In an epoch of vengeance-seeking survivors, of victims’ rights, the Greens have waged an extraordinary, and extraordinarily low-key, crusade for compassion. They have refused to forfeit their right to forgive.

*

The killing took place at night, on a highway in Italy. Men hidden behind black bandannas pulled alongside the Greens’ rented Fiat. Words were shouted. The Greens did not speak enough Italian to understand. They did, however, comprehend the tone of menace, and attempted to pull away. Shots were fired. A bullet found the back of Nicholas Green’s head. The boy had been sleeping in the back seat, beside his little sister.

“He never woke up,” said Meg Green.

Two days later, doctors determined that the boy was brain-dead. On the spot, the Greens made what they now describe as “a simple decision.” They would donate their son’s organs for use in transplant operations. Seven Italians now walk the planet with a piece of Nicholas Green, his eyes, his liver, cells from his pancreas, his kidneys, his heart.

This selfless act under horrid duress stirred Italy, prompting all sorts of official and spontaneous expressions of gratitude. In turn, it gave the Greens a cause, a way to salvage some light from the darkness of their son’s death. They would become advocates for organ donations, and Nicholas, as Reg Green has been told, “is now the world’s most famous organ donor.”

And yet that is but a part of what Green, a former Fleet Street newspaperman, terms “the magic” of his son’s story. It does not explain the sort of letters that the Greens still receive from strangers, thanking them for restored faith, even for changed lives. No, something beyond the noble cause of organ donations is at work here, although in another sense it has everything to do with the heart.

*

People who encounter the Greens are touched most by their refusal from the start to show anger, to demand an eye for an eye, blood for blood. Meg Green said that, as a Christian, she knew about the concept of forgiveness, “but it turned out to be much more important than I suspected.” Reg Green, who testified in the trial, was there in the courtroom when the verdicts were read. One of his first acts was to hug a mother of the accused, one hurting parent to another. While he does not want his son’s killers to go unpunished, the father also said of the suspects: “If this will put them on a new path somehow or another . . . that is what we hope for.”

All this can be incomprehensible to some people. “I couldn’t do that,” the Greens are often told. It would be a mistake, however, to misread it as a show of weakness or even as evidence of a lack of love. The opposite is true. What the Greens demonstrate is that such losses are not always best measured by the volume of the cries for vengeance. More than two years later, they still miss their boy. They still hurt.

“It’s just that I don’t see,” said the mother, “that railing against death does any good. I don’t see that railing against the men who did it does any good. So we haven’t let ourselves get too tied up in who they are, and in what happened that night, and in seeking vengeance against the men who did it.”

Why not, she was asked.

“Because they are so small somehow.”

What is large, she said, is the hole ripped open by the loss of Nicholas, a boy like any young boy, filled with wonder and playful imagination and the promise of life. What the Greens know too well is that no jury, no verdict, no jail term, no execution, no vengeance, no justice--no hatred--can ever fill that bleak void. So they are trying another way.