A former Pittsburg mayor suffered in silence after his son was mortally wounded in a stabbing. His long journey ended with forgiveness, compassion

Pete Longmire was wracked with grief as his son suffered through paralysis and death, but as the years trickled by he somehow learned to forgive the man who caused it all.

As mayor of Pittsburg, Dwaine “Pete” Longmire’s public persona was the easygoing, even-keeled city leader who smiled at ribbon cuttings and warmly greeted constituents who spoke up at public meetings, even if they came there to yell at him.

But Longmire was keeping a secret that almost no one knew: Privately, he was consumed by grief. In 2012, just two years into Longmire’s tenure on the City Council, his son, Christopher Longmire, was stabbed in the neck, leaving him paralyzed, and expected to live just another six to eight years.

Powerless to change his son’s fate, Pete Longmire watched him inch toward his eventual death, all the while overwhelmed by his sadness — and anger at the person who caused it all. But a journey that began with such tragedy came to a place that no one involved could have predicted: Longmire taught himself to forgive, culminating in a face-to-face meeting with the man who stabbed his son.

A former police officer, Longmire has now chosen to publicly share his story, not just with the media but also at prisons and in crime survivor groups across California. His goal is to help not just the families of other victims, but also those serving time for violent crimes, with the hopes that his self-taught forgiveness can be contagious.

“It becomes better when I’m actively helping other people. That’s the life I want to live, versus that dark place where I was for all those years,” Longmire said in a recent interview. “When you’re going through it, you don’t feel that there’s a hope, but there is. But it’s not going to be easy.”

During his law enforcement career in Vallejo and Pittsburg, Longmire showed up to countless hospitals and crime scenes. But those experiences hardly helped on June 4, 2012, when his sister informed him that his son was at a trauma center in Castro Valley. There he found his son sedated, “with machines all around doing just everything for him.”

“The only thing the doctor would say was that it’s not about if he’s going to be OK, it’s about, ‘We just gotta get through each hour,'” Longmire recalled. “That went on for months.”

Christopher Longmire couldn’t move anything below his neck. His vocal cords didn’t work properly either; over the ensuing months and years, he would whisper or mouth the word “water” when he was thirsty, or move his face to indicate “yes” or “no.”

Christopher’s attacker, Keith Napier, was charged with attempted murder, mayhem and assault. The father and son came face-to-face with him at his preliminary hearing, with Christopher on the witness stand as Pete sat in the gallery, seething.

The next stage in the court process dealt Pete Longmire another emotional blow. Napier received a 14-year prison term, which Longmire didn’t learn of until it was decided, costing him a chance to make a victim impact statement in court. Had he done so, he said, he would have decried the deal as too lenient.

Little did Longmire know that inside prison, Napier was grieving too. He attended group therapy hoping to find some “peace of mind,” but found himself unable to shake his own guilt.

“It was nerve-wracking. It was heartbreaking,” Napier said in a recent interview. “I’ve thought about it every single day, believe me. It’s still with me.”

Pete Longmire kept his own suffering a secret from almost everyone. He smiled through council meetings and successful reelection campaigns, never letting his grief be publicly known. In 2018, he left city leadership. Christopher Longmire died two years later, on Jan. 16, 2020, of complications stemming from the stabbing. As Pete grieved, he realized he was losing his sense of self.

“I asked God, ‘Is there a way that I can forgive (Napier)?'” he said. “I wanted to be something different than what I was, I wanted to go back to me.”

Then one day, as Pete Longmire was driving through the East Bay, forgiveness found him, seemingly out of the blue.

“I don’t know how to explain it. I was driving and suddenly it just lifted,” he recalled. “I just felt so light. I didn’t feel anger, I didn’t feel revenge, hatred or suffering. In that moment, I felt free.”

With that, came a burning desire to meet Napier face-to-face. So Longmire reached out to the Ahimsa Collective, a Bay Area-based group dedicated to restorative justice and helping people re-enter society after prison. The organization is authorized to set up so-called Victim Offender Dialogues, which are often initiated by victims’ family members or survivors of crimes.

“When you hate yourself, when you’re not in a good relationship with yourself, you cannot be in a good relationship with others. And when you hate yourself you hate others,” said Martina Lutz-Schneider, who runs the collective’s VOD program. “To us, it’s actually a matter of community safety to bring people back to, ‘There’s goodness in me.'”

It took years of preparation. Pete Longmire was interviewed. So was Napier. Restrictions due to COVID-19 disrupted the process. Then in June 2021, just as it seemed as though their meeting was on the horizon, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office served up an unexpected complication: Christopher Longmire’s death had been ruled a homicide, which made Napier a murder suspect.

It was the result that Pete Longmire had longed for years earlier when Christopher was alive — a potential life sentence for Napier. But now, it was the last thing he wanted. So he lobbied against it in private meetings with high-ranking prosecutors and a public letter to a judge where Longmire laid his pain bare.

Longmire described his son’s suffering and his own, his path to forgiveness, and how it all had led him to the conclusion that a murder prosecution now would “prevent my healing,” and rob him of the chance to meet Napier face-to-face. In late 2021, the courts and the DA listened. Napier couldn’t believe it when he learned who “went to bat” for him and got the charges dropped.

“I look at Pete as a blessing,” Napier said. “I feel like I’ll forever be in his debt.”

Finally, in May of 2022, Longmire walked through the doors of a prison in Stockton and sat down across a small table from the person who killed his son. Just two men in pain, connected by the same tragedy and its life-changing repercussions. Longmire told Napier they had a “clean slate.” Napier replied he never went a day without thinking of Christopher and would never stop.

“I regret having to take this journey, it’s something that I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” Longmire said. “I don’t want people to struggle in the way that I have struggled.”

Today, Longmire continues to visit prisons and victim-survivor groups to share his story. He doesn’t have insuperable hopes that a 30-minute chat with him will be transformative overnight, just that his experiences can create some good in the world.

Napier, meanwhile, was granted parole earlier this year and remains free. While they have not reconnected, Longmire recently expressed his forgiveness in another way, by quashing a standard post-conviction court order that would have subjected Napier to prosecution if he went within several miles of Longmire, potentially inhibiting his ability to find work.

“I really hope that Keith does something with it,” Longmire said. “I hope he pays it forward in some kind of way, whether it’s big or small.”