From Politico Magazine:

A few years back, Melvin Bledsoe was living a black middle-class, Southern Baptist version of the American dream. Both of his children were college bound, a step up the socioeconomic ladder that Melvin’s own parents could never afford. The Bledsoes were a tightly knit family clasped in the bosom of a supportive and familiar community. And then a personal crisis opened the door to an utterly unfamiliar intruder, and an idea was planted in a wounded psyche that improbably blossomed into a dark and noxious ideology. And before they even understood the gathering peril, the Bledsoes’ American dream became a nightmare.

Somehow, in ways that a heartbroken Melvin Bledsoe even now doesn’t fully comprehend, his beloved son Carlos was transformed into a murderous jihadist, a hate-filled man who called himself Abulhakim Mujahid Mohammed.