The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [140]
Kali is unreachable, but I speak to her sister. I ask if her brother was a gang member. “When he was little—but he changed a lot,” she says. “He matured and [wasn’t] involved in gangs.” There has been no arrest, but police believe her brother’s killing was gang-related.
THROUGHOUT HIS TEENAGE YEARS, Shafi remained a good student and respectful son—at least that’s what his family observed. But many others I speak to noticed a shift in his behavior a few years ago. They say that he started to drink alcohol and began hanging out with the wrong kinds of people (Shafi’s family disputes this). Law-enforcement sources say that he was arrested in April 2005 while smoking marijuana in a parked car. The police gave him a citation and a small fine for possession of the drug. A few days later he was arrested for passing a forged check.
One day about a year later he turned up at a spoken-word event called Nomadic Expression, at the Profile Event Center, a community meeting place on University Avenue in southeast Minneapolis, with a Dell flat-screen monitor. A community leader who knew and liked Shafi asked him where the monitor had come from. He was selling it for a friend, Shafi said, “for gas money.”
“I was like, ‘Shafi, you’re better than this,’” the community leader says. “‘Why are you doing this? If you need gas money you can ask me, you know?’”
A young Somali woman who knew Shafi noticed the change in him in 2006. “He would come and always harass one of the girls that was working [at the Profile] and say, ‘Give me something to eat—I have money,’ and always yelling,” she says.
Shafi lived alone with his mother, who doesn’t speak English very well. All seven of his siblings had left home.
In early May 2006, the police investigated Shafi on a charge of indecent conduct—specifically, that he allegedly made lewd comments to an 11-year-old girl.
On Friday, May 26, the community leader from the center sat Shafi down. “I saw the pattern he was following,” he says. “The stolen monitor, and then the drink—I knew what was coming next.” The man gave Shafi a ride to where he was meeting his friends, taking the opportunity to try to talk some sense into Shafi, who was noticeably drunk.
No one I speak to knows for sure what turned Shafi from a quiet, studious boy into someone constantly on the verge of trouble. “Maybe he was going through hard times, or he wanted to see what life was like other than being in the mosque, being the nice guy,” the community leader tells me.
On the night before Memorial Day, there was a party at the Profile. Shafi was there. One room in the center was hosting a traditional Somali concert while a hip-hop show was going on elsewhere in the building.
The Somali who claims she had seen Shafi harassing a woman at the Profile was at the hip-hop party. Later, she heard that Shafi was drunk and had been telling a Somali gang that they were nothing compared with another group.
“When he [was] drunk he [talked] a hell of a lot,” she tells me.
PEOPLE 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.