12:34 PM PDT on Friday, May 7, 2004

Associated Press

PORTLAND - 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.

Mayfield’s stepmother, Ruth Alexander, in Halstead, Kan., where Mayfield grew up, recalled a compassionate child who once kept a pet grasshopper.

Her stepson went into the Army right after he graduated from high school, “because he felt that was the right thing to do,” Alexander said.

He was posted at Fort Lewis Army Base in Tacoma, Wash., where he met his wife, Egyptian-born Mona, who immigrated to Olympia, Wash. as a child. They married and had three children—ages 10, 12 and 15.

Their youngest was born on the Bitburg air base in western Germany in 1992, where Brandon Mayfield was stationed in the air defense unit. His only trip to the Middle East, said his wife, was in 1993, when the couple and their three children took a 30-day leave to travel to Mounsura, Egypt.

Her husband was honorably discharged in 1994, after a shoulder injury. The couple returned and Mayfield attended Portland State University, where his favorite topic was constitutional law.

“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.

Mayfield was a regular at a Beaverton mosque near their home, where his red hair and white skin stood out in a crowd of mostly new immigrants from Muslim countries.

He was seen as a moderate, said mosque administrator Shahriar Ahmed. Mayfield showed up for the Friday ritual of shedding his shoes, washing his bare feet and sitting on the carpets to hear services. He did not, as some devout Muslims do, pray five times a day at the mosque, Ahmed said.

“He was on the less religious side if anything,” Ahmed said. He was reserved, but liked to talk about what he considered civil rights violations of Muslims after the Sept. 11 attacks, Ahmed said. “He was very much interested in civil rights, if you get into discussion with him.”

Mayfield passed the Oregon bar in 2000 and largely kept a low profile in the Portland legal community, representing poor clients in family law and immigration cases.

Many were referrals from the state bar association’s Modest Means Program, which refers poor clients to attorneys willing to work at a discount, said Kateri Walsh, spokeswoman for the Oregon Bar Association.

He worked out of a rented office west of downtown Portland. Short, bearded and bespectacled, Mayfield was so unremarkable there that a massage therapist working in the building there could not recall ever seeing him.

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.