Washington Post, He Could Have Been the GOP’s Voice on Crime, But His Faith Intervened:
Bleeding from his brain and minutes from surgery that would determine whether he lived or died, Phillip Todd had a question.
He looked at his mother, sitting by his hospital bed.
Did anyone know the name of the attacker who had singled him out on a busy street in Northeast Washington?
She tapped her phone and searched, “H Street stabbing.”
Todd, then 26 and an aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), was picking up a burrito bowl on a March afternoon in 2023 when a stranger emerged from the shadows and stabbed him four times for no sane reason. The attack came during an exceptionally violent period in the nation’s capital, with the 2023 homicide toll reaching a 26-year high. Congressional Republicans, berating city officials as soft on crime, began threatening to end the District’s ability to govern itself. They were joined by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
That day at MedStar Washington Hospital Center — before Todd’s surgery and the start of his long physical and emotional recovery — his mom, Helen Todd, glanced up from her phone. She had found a news article identifying the person charged with stabbing her son.
His name, she said, was Glynn Neal. He would become central to Todd’s struggle over the coming years to decide where he stands on issues of crime and punishment, of mercy and redemption.
Todd, a 6-foot-tall Missourian and son of Christian missionaries, was among at least three Capitol Hill staffers and two House members victimized in unrelated assaults and robberies in the District in recent years. One of them, a congressional intern, was killed by a stray bullet this summer on a downtown street. …
As Todd lay bleeding on the sidewalk, the scourge of violence in D.C. transformed from a partisan issue unfolding in the background of his life to a defining feature of it. Nothing could predict how he would deal with it internally, as he embarked on a personal struggle to find closure, one shared by many victims of violent crime.
“Glynn Neal,” he heard his mother say in the hospital room.
Todd prayed for the strength to forgive him. …
The attacker’s knife had pierced his diaphragm and punctured the membrane around his brain, necessitating a surgically implanted metal plate. Todd, still intubated, was experienced enough in politics to anticipate the potency of his attack in a city working to address rising crime and combat congressional interference in those efforts. …
Todd, an economist for Paul’s Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, had been drawn to Capitol Hill by a belief that one person could make a difference. While he found the debate over the direction of local criminal justice to be interesting — his favorite book is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” — he had never before had to assess where he personally stood on how perpetrators of crime should be treated. …
Todd, recovered enough to leave the hospital, started to consider whether and how to use his newfound platform. He believed he had survived the stabbing because he had followed the teachings of Jesus, forgoing thoughts of vengeance against the man who had tried to kill him and focusing instead on mercy. …
“I want the world to know that I’ve forgiven Glynn,” Todd recalled saying to his parents, “and because of that, there have been benefits given to me.”
Incarceration, he felt, may not be the way to bring his assailant closer to God. Neal, now 44, already had served 13 years in prison after being convicted of luring two North Carolina women into prostitution in the District and repeatedly beating them when they resisted having sex with strangers, court records show. Neal, whose attorneys did not return requests for comment, was released on March 24, 2023 — the day before Todd was attacked.
“That clearly did not work,” Todd recalled telling his parents, meaning Neal’s years behind bars.
“At the same time,” he said to them, he recalled in an interview, “I also don’t want the world to misperceive forgiveness as ceding that this is okay.” …
Todd, who grew up traveling the world with his parents, spreading the Gospels, said he hoped that prayer could reach Neal in a way that the doctors and lawyers could not. … [H]e started drafting a letter to the man who attacked him. … “I have prayed for you every day since March 25, 2023,” he wrote.
He was tired of squaring his faith and his politics. Crime, to him, was not political. It was personal.
He sent the letter, speaking not to Congress or to a jury but to the man on the other side of the knife.
He had little expectation that he’d receive a response. But for now, in this hurting and polarized world, that would be enough.
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