Otto Penzler - The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

“All I knew is war,” she tells me when I ask her what she remembers of Somalia. “It was hell. I saw a lot of death. I saw bodies on the streets.”

At her new school in Minneapolis, Kali found herself the target of bullies. They’d call her names, beat her up, steal her money, and threaten to strip her naked or pull her head scarf off, exposing her hair. There was a group of kids at her high school, Roosevelt, called RTS. Rough Tough Somalis. Kali joined. They would tell their attackers, “We kill our own. You think we care about you?”

Some gang members started routinely carrying weapons, but Kali did not go that far. She had her own tactic, something she’d learned in Africa.

“One day I got jumped, really bad,” she says. “And they cut my chest. So I went to the hospital. I was in for a month.” Kali was patient as she planned her revenge against the African-American girls who had stabbed her. She waited until she was fully recovered. Then, one winter day after school, she and a friend followed the two girls who Kali says had attacked her onto a bus. The bus stopped and the girls got off.

“Let them beat me all they want, but I’m going to get their face,” Kali told her friend.

She carried five razor blades in her mouth. Kali says that they cut a little, but she had numbed the pain with alcohol. She nestled one blade in each cheek, a third under her tongue, a fourth on her tongue, and the last pressed against the roof of her mouth. She used an oil to lubricate the blades and make them easier to spit out.

On the street she confronted the girl she says had stabbed her. “When she tried to hit me I spit at her,” Kali says. The blade sliced near the girl’s eye, as planned. “She couldn’t see. She was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’”

Kali caught up with the second girl, who had started running. “I [spit] like four razors in her face.”

Both girls were on the sidewalk, blood from the cuts blinding them. “They were crying like a baby bird,” Kali says.

She ran before the police came.

Eventually Kali dropped out of high school, and her mother threw her out of the house, she says. She had several troubled years and a couple of kids with a man she’s no longer with before she got straight. Now Kali spends as much time as possible talking with younger Somali gang members, persuading them that joining gangs is a big mistake.

“Everywhere in the world, they all have gangs,” she says. “But Somalian gangs are more complicated because they go by tribe. There’s a D-Block gang, which is Darod, which is a tribe. There’s Hot Boyz, which is Hawiye, the ones who are running Somalia right now. There’s a lot of different tribes.”

And then Kali echoes what I’ve heard from law-enforcement officials: “What happens in Somalia is going on right here.”

Her words foreshadowed a tragic event. Just over a month after I met her last winter, Kali’s 27-year-old brother was shot dead in south Minneapolis, along with a distant 25-year-old relative.

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.”

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.”