Mirsad Bektic escaped war-torn Bosnia as a child. | Photo: Gleidson Venga/Sherdog.com
According to Krdzic, Mirsad’s Srebrenica received a good brunt of the Bosnian War. To this day, 20 years later, they are still finding mass graves with hundreds of bodies. Mirsad bounced around from the camps in Italy and Germany before coming to the United States in 1999, when he was 8. He settled in Lincoln, Neb.
“I learned to phase a lot of things out, like I had no feeling,” said Mirsad, who was introduced to karate by a grade-school counselor. “I used to sleepwalk in the camps and wake up in bathrooms.