Otto Penzler - The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

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, 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.”

JEFFREY TOOBINhas been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and is the senior legal analyst for CNN. In 2000 he received an Emmy Award for his coverage of the Elián González case. He is the author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, which spent more than four months on the New York Times bestseller list. Before joining The New Yorker, Toobin served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Brooklyn, New York. He lives in Manhattan.

OTTO PENZLERis the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop, the founder of the Mysterious Press, the creator of Otto Penzler Books, and the editor of many books and anthologies.

THOMAS H. COOKis the author of twenty-three books, including The Chatham School Affair, which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel, and, most recently, The Fate of Katherine Carr.

GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

“The Zankou Chicken Murders” by Mark Arax, first published in Los Angeles magazine, April. Copyright © 2008 by Mark Arax. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Everyone Will Remember Me as Some Sort of Monster” by Mark Boal, first published in Rolling Stone, August 21. Copyright © 2008 by Mark Boal. Reprinted by permission of Kuhn Projects as agents for the author.

“Mexico’s Red Days” by Charles Bowden, first published in GQ, August. Copyright © 2008 by Charles Bowden. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Stop, Thief!” by John Colapinto, first published in The New Yorker, September 1. Copyright © 2008 by John Colapinto. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Fabulous Fraudulent Life of Jocelyn and Ed” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, first published in Rolling Stone, March 20. Copyright © 2008 by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Reprinted by permission of Rolling Stone and the author.

“True Crime” by David Grann, first published in The New Yorker, February 11/18. Copyright © 2008 by David Grann. Reprinted by permission of the author.