Earlier this summer, I wrote my last letter to a boyhood friend. He was executed 11 days after I mailed it. In his letter to the warden of the Florida State Prison on July 1, 2025, Governor DeSantis signed the death warrant. A friend sent me a link about it on July 17. I started writing my letter the next day.

Zak (his nickname and the first three letters of his long Polish surname) was the boy almost next door—only one house separated us. We were very different, but we did a lot together—played in the neighborhood, walked home from school, freshman and JV basketball, and countless other hours of togetherness. I left for my first year at Hope College in August 1983. Days before I left, he was in his driveway and I walked over to say goodbye. He had just proudly returned from the bookstore of what was then called Grand Rapids Junior College, showing me his new textbooks and other school supplies. Holding up his different ring binders, he murmured, “Organization is the key, Stoep,” with his lips wrapped around a lit cigarette.

That was the last time I saw him. College was not for him. He left JC and joined the military, serving both domestically and abroad. He was on active duty until he committed his crimes. Eleven years after I last saw him in his driveway, I was living in Orange City, Iowa, and my phone rang on a Friday evening. Like most Friday nights in Orange City, I was at home. It was my mom, in tears. She adored Zak, but she had just watched an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, where Zak was identified as the perpetrator of the most grizzly and heinous crimes that I could imagine. (The gruesome details were redescribed in the attachment of Governor DeSantis’s death warrant. I hadn’t read those documents in many years. It wasn’t any easier this time around.) 

Shortly after his arrest, I began a years-long letter exchange with him. We talked some about the past but mostly about the present. We never talked about the future. In one of his letters, he told me the circumstances that led to his arrest. After he committed the crimes, he took a new name (Michael Green), boarded flights that took him from Florida to Hawaii, and moved into a rural wooded Christian compound led by a Pentecostal minister. Boarding a flight with no ID and an assumed name seems unimaginable in a post-9/11 world, but this was 1994. There was no electricity on the compound but occasionally the minister and patriarch (Zak called him “Papi”) would fire up the generator after a large Hawaiian meal on a Friday night so the group could watch TV as a special treat. One night, they watched Unsolved Mysteries. That show struck me as an odd viewing choice for what I assumed was a holy group, but it was their selection on that evening. When Zak’s face appeared on the screen, a hush settled over the group. One person quipped, “Michael, it looks like you have a twin.” A quiet and very nervous collective laughter tried to spring up. After the episode, Zak retired to his cabin, woke up before anyone else early the next morning, walked to the nearest town, and turned himself in. He pled guilty and argued intervening factors at sentencing. During the penalty phase, the jury voted 7-5 that he should be executed. He was on death row for nearly 30 years.

In my letters, I would tell stories about my family and my basketball officiating and the courses I was teaching. I would send him pictures of my children, preschool and elementary at the time. He reported those pictures brought him so much joy. He taped them to the wall of his cell. He told me that other inmates would smile as they passed by and would ask about those “adorable children.” He would share stories about fellow inmates, his exercise regimen, and what he was reading. Occasionally he would tell me of a public defender who was filing an appeal on his behalf to change his sentence to life without parole. There were many of those submitted to various courts over the years.

Eventually I stopped writing. I don’t have a good excuse. I apologized in my last letter:

I hope you get a chance to read my letter. It has been many years since I have written to you. I lament that I did not stay in touch with you more frequently and recently. I enjoyed our exchange of letters for those years when we wrote to each other. I should have kept in better touch. You deserved a better friend. I’m sorry.

We all have lost childhood friends. But this is different. I’ve been surprised by my varied reactions when I learned of his impending death. First, although I am opposed to the death penalty, it’s never been a top concern of mine. Maybe I should have engaged the issue more. Perhaps Christians, more than others, should take a strong stance against state-sanctioned killing. But it’s a messy world. There are tough questions about deterrence, cost, and the 8^th Amendment. I recognize the complexity of the arguments. Maybe that is why my response to his upcoming execution was less political and more emotional. 

Second, some people who knew Zak had a hard time thinking about reconnecting with him. In fact, he had very few pen pals from his childhood. I completely understand. It’s easy for us to think that any sympathy or compassion we showed him was a betrayal of his blameless and vulnerable victims. In this zero-sum empathy equation, it’s hard to show both compassion for him and yet also care for those so aggrieved by his monstrous actions. This balance gets harder when reading crime scene descriptions. And it would be even harder if one knew the victims. It was a little easier when I thought of how alone he must have felt in his final days and my hope that maybe my letter brought him a smidgen of happiness. I was reminded how complicated it is to balance the justice-mercy equation.

Perhaps my decision to write one last letter is a result of my knowledge of the baccalaureate program at the Muskegon Correctional Facility, offered jointly by Hope College and Western Theological Seminary. Although I haven’t taught a course there, I have made small financial contributions, visited MCF as an academic dean, and watched the first commencement ceremony online this summer. Zak would have loved participating in this program. He was smart, quick-witted, a good conversation partner, a voracious reader, and of course organized (because “organization is the key, Stoep”).

Third, I was surprised how little my last letter had to say about faith, the need for repentance, and the power of the resurrection. Here is what I said:

I am confident that I know what will happen to me when I die, but I can’t prove it. What we can’t prove we call faith. Faith is (according to my Christian faith tradition) “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). I bet you’ve heard a lot of preaching in the last 30 years, maybe even some good preaching, both in Hawaii and in prison. But this is not a preachy letter. I’ll leave the preaching to the preachers.

I used to write about my faith a lot when I was in regular contact with him. I was worried about his soul and was convinced that I had the magic words to make him right with God. I love revival hymns like “Softly and Tenderly” and “I Love to Tell the Story.” But I learned through Zak that such an approach is not in my comfort zone. I might still be evangelical (despite the term’s current baggage) but I’m not an evangelist. Zak perhaps sensed my unease or ham-handedness in my writing. In one letter he told me that he had converted to Christianity while in Hawaii, but in prison he became more aligned with Hindu principles and that he was comfortable with his faith choice. I think that was his polite way of asking me to change the subject. We didn’t talk much about religion after that.

Fourth, I noticed how easy it still was to write about the past. Given that he didn’t have a life with a future tense, the past was all I had to write about. As sad as I was, that part of the letter calmed me. I hope it calmed him, too:

Hearing of your news has prompted me to reflect, particularly on our youth, when we were part of each other’s lives. My mind is dizzied with memories of that innocent time. Your mind is likely even more so flooded with memories. The phrase “coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous” is credited to Albert Einstein. I’m not sure why our lives were intertwined during our formative years. No one knows why people get put into their life path. But I am grateful that you were there for me during those years. Adolescence is rarely easy and often painful. Your presence brought me joy. I laughed more when you were around. On quiet summer days I was less lonely when you were there. You made me take life less seriously. God put a lot of people in my life, including you, Zak. And I will remember those carefree times with joy. Thank you.

I suspect I am not alone in this regard. In an enduring relationship, it doesn’t take much to rekindle a conversation. Picking up where we left off seems to be a lasting gift of friendship, no matter how different we become or how much time passes.

Finally, my letter prompted me to re-ask some hard questions—the same ones that I asked when I used to write him regularly. The Bible tells stories of repentant murderers, so there is clear evidence that grace is not off-limits to those who take a human life. But the cognitions get muddied when we’re thinking about someone we know. Even if I assume Zak repented, I’ve been surprised how hard it has been for me to imagine him as cleansed. I supposed this is evidence of my fallenness; I receive the gift of salvation, but somehow draw an arbitrary ethical line beyond which (in my mind) the sin is just too great.

I emailed his attorney on July 29. I asked her to say goodbye to him for me if she had the chance. She visited him on the morning of his execution, presumably to inform him that both of his final state and federal appeals had been denied. She emailed back, “We spoke to Zak on Thursday morning and passed along your message. He thanked me for letting him know you had reached out and confirmed that he had received your letter.” Media reports indicated that, after he was strapped to the chair, he began reciting Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” until his breathing became irregular. He died on July 31 at 6:12pm.

I spent the afternoon of July 31 in my boyhood town of Ada, Michigan. I visited Ada Cemetery where my parents are buried. I remembered the fondness they both had for Zak. I then walked through downtown, where we would sometimes go to fill up a summer day. Then I drove to Adacroft Commons, our old neighborhood, traversing every street that we would travel over on our bikes. It was much quieter than I remember. Not many kids. Two on their bikes. Two kicking a soccer ball. I then sat in my car in front of his house for a long time. I listened to Springsteen’s Nebraska album and a new song that Springsteen released in June on his Tracks II box set entitled “God Sent You,” the lyrics of which I included to close my final letter to him. As the six o’clock hour arrived and passed that evening, a few old friends exchanged texts. It was good to gather with them, even if remotely.

It felt right for me to spend the afternoon back home, present at the place where I last saw him. I got the chance to remember the whimsical kid who was nearly unanimously voted our high school’s class clown. I imagined myself, over and over, cutting across the neighbor’s yard that August day in 1983 to say goodbye. That afternoon, we were 18 again, turning the page and starting something new. I forgot everything else. Instead, I got to watch my younger self say goodbye to my friend.