The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 (31 page)

P
EOPLE AREN’T TELLING THE POLICE
much about what happened that night, but what is known is that at about three on Monday morning someone shot Shafi dead on the street outside a local TV station. The shooting was just over the border between the Twin Cities, in St. Paul. Police were called to the scene, where they found a man with gunshot wounds. An employee at the TV station claimed that six shots were fired and that two young men drove away in a white van. Shafi Ahmed was pronounced dead at the scene by St. Paul Fire Department paramedics.

Law-enforcement officials tell me that it’s a case they expect will never be solved. “The suspects were never charged in the murder,” one official says. “And a lot of that has to do with the sheer fact that witnesses wouldn’t come forward. And I don’t foresee witnesses coming forward in the future. People in the community know who did it, but nobody wants to be a witness. There’s a lot of fear.”

T
WO YOUNG
S
OMALIS
I
SPEAK WITH
, Yusuf and Ali (not their real names), say they know what happened to Shafi Ahmed. We talk at a juvenile-probation facility in Minneapolis, in the presence of their probation officers. Yusuf and Ali decline to say what they have done to get in trouble. They insist that they are not in gangs, and that they don’t even like to use the term, preferring
groups
or
brotherhoods.
Yusuf, who says that as a child in Mogadishu he was hit in the neck with a piece of shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade, is dressed hip-hop-style. Ali is articulate and has a job at Target. I ask them what happened to Shafi.

“It was actually the [gang that] my brother was in,” Ali says. He adds that Shafi was a member of the gang. “They were both in it.”

So was he killed by a rival gang or members of his own gang?

Ali says he doesn’t know.

The guys he thinks may have killed him “really hated” Shafi, Ali says, “especially the one that ran away, that we believe pulled the trigger. They really hated each other, them two.”

“And did he belong to a different group?” one of the probation officers asks. He’s referring to the killer.

“Yeah,” Ali says.

Whatever the circumstances, Shafi Ahmed was shot and killed in the street, like his father in Mogadishu; the perpetrator is still at large; and it’s unlikely that anyone will be charged with the crime.

D
EK
N
OR,
Shafi’s half-brother, opens his wallet and pulls out a folded piece of paper. We are in the living room of his mother’s house. He unfolds the paper and holds it flat. It’s a mug shot. A young Somali man stares impassively at the camera.

Nor reads out the name below the photograph: “Abdiwali Abdirazak Farah.” His date of birth: August 26, 1986. Just a few months after Nor’s murdered brother’s.

Farah is a suspect in Shafi’s killing (although he has never been charged), a law-enforcement source confirms. The only problem is that soon after the shooting, authorities believe, he got on a flight back to Somalia, en route to a relatively peaceful, semi-autonomous region called Puntland. No one expects him to return to the United States voluntarily, and the government of Somalia has more pressing matters to attend to than extraditing some kid back to America. Some people say Farah is now in Dubai.

Shafi’s family believes Farah was in Puntland, at least temporarily, because they faxed his picture to family members still living in Somalia, and someone in Puntland claimed to have recognized him in a store. If Farah was proved to be guilty, under tribal law, Shafi’s family in the United States could have sought redress from Farah’s family in Somalia. But, the family says, they held a meeting after Shafi’s death to discuss how they should respond to what had happened. They were in America now, they decided, and American laws would apply. They want American justice.

So they grieve, and once or twice a month someone from the family drives to a spot seven miles south of the Mall of America and visits a granite gravestone in the Muslim corner of a mainly Christian cemetery. A bronze plaque on the granite reads:
SHAFI AHMED. APR
. 29, 1986-MAY 29, 2006.

When I visit the grave it is early morning on a lovely fall day. People in the city are saying that the snow will come soon, and they’re bracing themselves for the hard slog through the crushing winter.

Gang members stay inside, like everyone else, during the cold. But when the summer arrives, trouble will follow. And with the influx of Flight 13s, with their limited English, their years in refugee camps, and their memories of violence, there could be a fresh crop of kids trying to prove themselves Flight 13s no longer.

“Most of the things happen in the summer,” Ali says. “Everyone comes out; it’s hot. There’s guns everywhere. It’s, like, shootings everywhere. One of these days I’m going to end up dead.”

M
ATT
M
C
A
LLESTER
was for thirteen years a reporter for
Newsday.
He was part of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. In 1999, he became the newspaper’s
Middle East correspondent, based in Jerusalem. He has covered conflicts in Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Kosovo, Nepal, Nigeria, Macedonia, Pakistan, and Turkey. McAllester has published three books:
Beyond the Mountains of the Damned: The War Inside Kosovo (
2002), named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by
Publishers Weekly; Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam’s Iraq
(2004); and
Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother’s Kitchen
(2009). He has won several awards, including the Asia Society’s Osborn Elliott Award for excellence in Asian journalism, the George Plimpton Feature Writing Award, and three Overseas Press Club citations. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is a contributing editor at
Details
magazine.

Coda

Summer didn’t need to come for the killing to start again in the Twin Cities. On December 1, 2007, a few weeks after I left town, police found the bodies of two young Somali men at a house in south Minneapolis. One of the dead, Arie Musse Jama, was a rapper with a long criminal record. People called him Snoop. He had been in the Rough Tough Somalis. Snoop’s brother, Mohamed, apparently swore revenge, but seven months later, before he could even the score with the guy he believed killed Snoop, he too was shot dead. By that time the killing season had begun in earnest once more: Abdillahi Awil Abdi, aged eighteen, shot dead on April 11, 2008. And then, on September 29, twenty-two-year-old Abdishakur Adan Hassan, whose alleged murderer was Abdillahi Abdi’s cousin. That was five dead Somali youths in under a year. There were other shootings that did not result in fatalities.

In early 2009, I asked Jeanine Brudenell, who was now the Somali community liaison officer for the Minneapolis Police Department, if there were any updates on the Shafi Ahmed case.
“He is still gone,” she said of Shafi’s alleged killer. “I don’t see that one closing any time soon.”

Brudenell told me that since October 2008 things had been quieter. It was the winter lull again, she said. “I am expecting an increase in the summer,” she said. “We shall see over the next few months.”