The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [141]
TWO YOUNG SOMALIS 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.
DEK NOR, 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.”
MATT MCALLESTER 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,