Ex-white supremacist erases hatred from face via laser tattoo removal

[cnd]

A FORMER racist skinhead has put himself through months of pain to erase the hate tattooed on his face.

Bryon Widner and his wife Julie were pillars of the white power movement when they first met - she a member of the National Alliance, he a founder of the Vinlanders gang of skinheads in Ohio.

People grabbed their children when Mr Widner swaggered into a store, and lowered their voices when he entered a restaurant.

He had symbols of racist violence carved into his face and the letters HATE stamped across the knuckles of his right hand. "Blood & Honour" was tattooed across his neck, "Thug Reich" across his belly, swastikas adorned his shaved scalp. On his forehead, a thick, black, upward-pointing arrow symbolised his willingness to die for his race.

But after getting married in 2006, and settling down together to raise Mrs Widner's three children from a former marriage, and a child of their own, the couple started to question their racist beliefs.

"It was like overnight he went from being a drunk, a skinhead and a fighter, to being this kind, nurturing father and husband," Mrs Widner says. "He was amazing."

Mr Widner mailed his 'patch' back to his skinhead clan and threw his racist belongings into a bonfire.

But he knew he still had to wiped the tattoos from his face. He was shunned on job sites, in stores and restaurants. People saw a menacing thug, not a loving father.

Mrs Widner was terrified - afraid her husband would do something reckless, even disfigure himself.

"We had come so far," she says. "We had left the movement, had created a good family life. We had so much to live for."

The couple had scoured the internet trying to learn how to safely remove the facial tattoos. But few doctors have performed such complicated surgery and it would have been prohibitively expensive.

So Widner began investigating homemade recipes. He reached the point, he said, where "I was totally prepared to douse my face in acid."

In desperation, Julie did something that once would have been unimaginable. She reached out to a black man.

Daryle Lamont Jenkins runs an anti-hate group in Philadelphia. He suggested the Widners contact T.J. Leyden, a former neo-Nazi skinhead Marine who had left the movement in 1996. In turn, Mr Leyden told him to call the Southern Poverty Law Center.

"It was like the Osama Bin Laden of the movement calling in." says Joseph Roy, chief investigator of hate and extreme groups for the SPLC.

"Very rarely have we met a reformed racist skinhead," says Mr Roy.

Mr Roy had dubbed Mr Widner the "pit bull" of skinheads. "No one was more aggressive, more confrontational, more notorious," he said.

And yet, over several weeks of conversations, he became convinced the couple genuinely wanted redemption.

So Mr Roy asked his organisation to find a donor to pay for Mr Widner's tattoos to be surgically removed. The donor, a longtime supporter of the SPLC, had been moved by Mr Widner's story - and shocked by photographs of his face.

"For him to have any chance in life and do good," she said, "I knew those tattoos had to come off."

She agreed to fund the $US35,000 ($32,400) surgery.

Dr. Bruce Shack, who chairs the Department of Plastic Surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, saw in Mr Widner one of the biggest challenges of his career.

He used a laser pen to trace the tattoos and burned them off Mr Widner's face. It took many sessions for the ink to fade.

"You are going to feel like you have the worst sunburn in the world, your face will swell up like a prizefighter, but it will eventually heal," Dr Shack warned Mr Widner.

Mr Widner said he had never felt such pain, in bar brawls or prison fights.

"I was real whiny during that time," he says.

"He was real brave," says Mrs Widner

After a couple of sessions, Dr Shack decided that Mr Widner was in too much pain: The only way to continue was to put him under general anesthetic for every hour-and-a-half operation. In all he underwent 25 surgeries over the course of 16 months, on his face, neck and hands.

The couple had agreed to allow a film crew to follow Widner through his surgeries. Mr Widner said he hoped some angry young teenager on the verge of becoming a skinhead would see Mr Widner's suffering and think twice.

After a recent screening of the documentary in California, a black woman embraced Mr Widner in tears. "I forgive you," she cried.

Mr Widner's arms and torso are still extensively tattooed. He is in the process of inking over the "political" ones, like the Nazi lightning bolts. But his face is clean and scar free, and he has a shock of thick black hair.

His neck and hands have suffered some pigment damage, he gets frequent migraine headaches and he has to stay out of the sun. But, he says, "it's a small price to pay for being human again."

http://www.news.com.au/world/ex-white-supremacist-erases-hatred-from-face-via-laser-tattoo-removal/story-e6frfkyi-1226181850532#ixzz1cYRrHtCH

[Reyna ♔]

It's unbelievable that he went to so great a length in the first place

[eli's_rhythm]

This is fascinating.

It doesn't really say why he reformed, though. It sounded more like he did it for his family/children and not because he had a dramatic change in his beliefs.

[Laveaux]

i love tattoo's, but I never could understand why somebody would tattoo their face. I just dont get it.

anywho, im glad he got all that negativity removed...thats hard to carry around all day.