Jason Ludke (Part 1)

Fragments of a future narrative

Jason Ludke’s mother tossed him across a room when he was four. It was Christmas Day, 1994, Milwaukee.

In October 2016, law enforcement officers arrested him near San Angelo, Texas. He and his friend, Yosvany Padilla-Conde, were driving southeast towards Mexico—planning, the FBI charged, to fly overseas to join ISIS. Jason, branded “a true danger” by federal prosecutors, got seven years.

He was back in Wisconsin in 2022. I flew there late that September, pulling up to Parsons House, where he was staying, in a ridiculous rented truck (I own a Corolla). We drove through Milwaukee’s Amani neighborhood—noted “for poverty, crime and violence”—to buy cigarettes, then to Estabrook Park in Shorewood.

I’ll get you your paperwork, Jason remembers the informant telling him. You just come over—you join the Islamic State. You can just live as a person over here. “I never talked about trying to go join the army—or, like, trying to go fight Americans,” he elaborated. He wanted only to “migrate away. Just go live.”

By his mid-30s, Jason had a lifetime’s worth of reasons to flee, detailed in a document drafted by the Federal Defender Services of Wisconsin. After childhood visits from foster care to his parents, he would return “hungry and dirty, with bruises, his clothes soaked in urine and filled with feces.” Around the time he was ten, “police found Jason living out of a dumpster.”

“I remember reading that, too,” he recalled under the autumning trees. “I just don’t remember it.”