Material Witness

    

The night of the Madrid train bombing, Mona and Brandon Mayfield were watching the Disney Channel with their children, when their program was interrupted by breaking news from the deadly devastation in Spain.

"He turned to me and said -- 'Those Goddamn terrorists. I'm sick and tired of them harming civilians,'" said Mona Mayfield, 35, remembering her husband's response.

Nearly two months later, her husband, thirty-seven-year-old Brandon Mayfield, a Portland attorney, became the first American to be arrested in connection with the Madrid bombing.

He is a former Army lieutenant who lives in a modest home in a Portland suburb, a convert to Islam who attends a mosque in nearby Beaverton and a native of Oregon who grew up in Kansas.

His family adamantly denies any connection to the train bombing.

"I think it's crazy -- we haven't been outside the country for 10 years," said his wife, who met her husband on a blind date at Fort Lewis army base near Tacoma, Wash. in 1987. "They found only a part of one fingerprint. It could be anybody. He was in the army and they're just trying to fit a certain profile."

Law enforcement officials in Spain said Friday that Mayfield's fingerprints had been found on bags containing detonators of the kind used in the March 11 attack. He is being held as a material witness, which allows the government to hold him without filing formal charges, to allow time for further investigation.

"He's innocent and he's another victim of the Patriot Act and people ought to be examining awful closely. If it can happen in my family it can happen to anybody," said his mother, AvNell Mayfield, in Hutchison, Kan.
...
"If the Constitution could be a religion -- that would be his religion," said his wife.

Mayfield converted to Islam after marriage, Alexander said. He comes from a family of non-church goers, she added.

"We have a Bible in the house. He's not a fundamentalist -- he thought it was something different and very unique," said Mona Mayfield, of her husband's conversion to Islam.
...
In 2002, he volunteered to represent Muslim terrorism suspect Jeffrey Battle in a child custody case.

Battle was among six Portland area residents who were sentenced last year on charges of conspiring to wage war against the United States by helping al-Qaida and the former Taliban rulers of Afghanistan.

Mona Mayfield was preparing her husband's lunch, when two FBI agents knocked on her door Thursday.

"I was vacuuming and I threw in a load in the washer. I heard the knock and thought it was the mailman," said Mayfield.

She said the agents sat her down at her dining room table and began ransacking her house. "I left everything as is. I didn't have the strength to clean it up," she said.

» kgw.com | News for Oregon and SW Washington | AP Wire