Forgiveness and Redemption Mark Lives of Gunman and Victim

The first time they met, David Magris pumped two bullets into Dennis Tapp, leaving him partially paralyzed for life.

The second time they met, they embraced.

Between those two meetings lies the story of a convict who returned from death row and a victim who overcame debilitating injuries to forgive his attacker.

“It made me feel better to be able to forgive,” Tapp says. “I’d rather have that than hatred in me. I didn’t forgive David Magris for him; I did it for myself.”

For his part, Magris still doesn’t fully understand how the man he left for dead can wish him well in life.

But he’s grateful.

“That kind of forgiveness . . . is to be not just honored but respected and admired and hopefully replicated,” Magris says.

Rewind to a June night in 1969.

Magris was out with three acquaintances, celebrating his 21st birthday with a one-night crime spree. Tapp, then 26, was working the graveyard shift at his father’s gas station in Vallejo.

“Two men came up to the service station and knocked on the door,” Tapp recalls. “They asked for keys to the bathroom. I said, ‘Bathroom’s open.’ ”

The next thing he knew, he was looking down the barrel of a sawed-off carbine.

“I opened the safe. I gave them my wallet,” Tapp says. “They said turn around. I turned around and I felt the first bullet hit me right in the middle of the back. Another bullet hit me right on my shoulder and I was paralyzed from the waist on down.”

Magris would later say, “I just panicked. I just started pulling the trigger and got out of there.”

Tapp was the second victim that night.

Magris and his cronies had first stopped at another gas station where they ordered attendant Steven Tompkins to fill a bag with money and then abducted him and drove to the outskirts of town. There, one of Magris’ accomplices fired several shots into Tompkins’ back.

Like Tapp, the 20-year-old Tompkins was left for dead. Unlike Tapp, he did not survive.

The two triggermen were ultimately sentenced to die in San Quentin’s gas chamber.

“I was in a state of shock,” recalls Tapp. “So many people were so happy--’Yeah, they got the death penalty!’ But not me.”

But Magris never saw the inside of California’s acid-green gas chamber. In 1972, he and 107 other inmates--including the man convicted of shooting Tompkins--were moved off death row after the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the law under which they were sentenced.

Magris decided to make good on his second chance. He got counseling and eventually earned a college degree. In 1985, he was paroled.

Meanwhile, Tapp had been fighting his own battle to stay alive.

He came to after the shooting to find himself “on the floor, bent over a heater and bleeding. I called the operator and the operator had the phone call traced. At the same time, I asked God to forgive the men who did this to me,” says Tapp, a devout Catholic.

“It was, in a sense, my confession.”

He ended up partially paralyzed, minus his right kidney and in need of several liver operations. Eventually, he defied the prognostications and walked again, although he still has a limp that he says makes him “walk like a drunk man.”

He drifted for a few years, unsure of what direction to take. Then in the mid-’70s, he “snapped out of that.”

Among other things, he bicycled cross-country and finished a walking marathon on his third attempt.

Today, Tapp, who spoke from his home in Eugene, Ore., is married and spends much of his time volunteering at a nearby hospice.

Although each step is a reminder of that night in 1969, his opposition to the death penalty has never wavered.

Tapp realizes some people can’t understand how he can consider Magris an ally.

“Some of them get kind of angry--’How could you do this?’ ” he says.

But there’s something his detractors don’t know.

“It’s easy. It really is easy,” he says.

After he was freed from prison, Magris immediately engaged in the battle against the death penalty.

He often spoke about his experiences, but never mentioned Tapp--”I didn’t feel I had the right to.”

Then he became a subject of an ABC-TV “20/20” report that followed the fate of those paroled from death row.

Asked if he wanted to meet Tapp, Magris agreed.

Forty-five minutes later he found himself knocking on a motel room door.

Then there was nothing between the two men but air--and tension.

“We were both afraid of each other because we were both afraid one of us might have a gun,” says Tapp, laughing as he remembered the tense moment.

“It seemed like the light of God was on him,” Magris recalls. “It was the same guy, only older. It was . . . almost 20 years.”

“He asked me if there was anything I wanted to say, and I said, ‘Yes, I apologize for my part in this crime that caused you to be partially paralyzed and almost killed you. You didn’t have that coming.’ ”

Tapp says the look in Magris’ eyes convinced him the apology was for real.

“I said, ‘David, I forgive you.’ ”

The whole time, Magris says, “I was reliving that crime. I remember seeing him, pulling the trigger, it was like a surreal slow-motion kind of thing. He was screaming and writhing in pain and dropping onto the ground. I was just incredibly moved.”

Today, Magris, 48, lives in Oakland and is an executive with a small business that prints calendars and other gift items. He is president of the Northern California Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Both he and Tapp adamantly oppose executions.

“It does us a disservice. It dehumanizes us. It desensitizes us,” says Magris.

“The death penalty’s ludicrous. It’s inhumane,” says Tapp.

These days, Tapp and Magris occasionally talk by phone. They’re not close friends, “but I could be,” says Tapp.

“David has a good personality. What he did was wrong; don’t get me wrong . . . he did something stupid and he paid for it.”

But he says much has changed in the 26 years since that first meeting nearly killed them both.

Each praises the other’s extraordinary pilgrimage.

“This is a living example of a person who moments after he was shot . . . was forgiving the people who did this to him,” Magris says.

Tapp, too, is proud of how Magris turned out.

“If I was going to get shot by anybody, I’m glad it was him,” he says.