Somali-Canadian murders: With their sons dying, a community seeks action — and help

Jayme Poisson
The Toronto Star

October 16, 2012 Markacadeey

The flyerhas her son’s picture on it. Not the mug shot police released in the days after he was killed by bullets, but a family picture from a cousin’s wedding. He looks happy. Handsome. Warm.

Written on one side is a plea for information and a Crime Stoppers hotline to send anonymous tips to police. On the back, the same plea in Somali.

On Sunday, Habiba Adan, still unable to walk by the narrow alleyway in Jamestown where her third boy, Warsame Ali, was gunned down with his friend last month, went door to door in the violence-plagued community housing project asking residents — some angry, others fearful — for help finding her son’s killer.

“I want to do my part,” she says. “To help police solve these murders.”

The cruel irony is that Warsame’s life was extinguished by the very violence his mother has spent two decades — and, in particular, the last three months — trying to stop.

Now, as she searchers for answers for her son, her resolve to find solutions for a community that is seeing too many of its young people die has taken on the force of the bullet that killed him.

After years of sounding alarm bells, people seem to be listening. And there’s a feeling that promises for change may actually be kept.

Just after midnight on Sept. 18, Warsame and Suleiman Ali, both 26 and not related, became the 27th and 28th shooting deaths of 2012. They are the fifth and sixth young Canadian-Somali men murdered in Toronto since June.

Shot in known gang territory in Etobicoke, inferences of gang violence followed in media reports. Det.-Sgt. Justin Vander Heyden says he doesn’t believe that to be the case.

“Their links to this community, from every piece of evidence we have, are social,” he said Sunday, while Adan and her husband, as well as Suleiman’s mother and sister, handed out flyers.

And while it’s been reported both young men are “known to police,” their charges were “relatively minor,” said Vander Heyden, adding police don’t believe past run-ins with the law had any influence on why they were there that night or their deaths. Both men had good families and jobs, he said. Suleiman left behind a 7-year-old son.

To most in this city, Warsame is just a statistic. To his older brother, Ahmed, Warsame was the guy who took his winter jacket off and handed it to a homeless man. To his parents, he was the son who, when off working in Montreal, would call nearly every night and say: “Mom, Dad, I love you.”

The community is bleeding and, if nothing is done, another Somali man will be murdered, Adan says while sitting in the living room of her friend’s home, surrounded by a handful of Somali-Canadian women, all there for their fledgling advocacy group.

“I don’t want another mother to go through what I have gone through.”

Adan, a petite woman, with glasses that complement a cerebral air and quiet grace, married Mohamed Hussein in 1977 in Mogadishu, Somalia.

He, with a degree in science and genetics, and another in anthropology, was the director of livestock projects for the east African country, and a lecturer at the local university.

She, once in charge of the census for the entire capital, worked at the ministry of planning.

They lived a middle-class life in the now war-ravaged and rocket-pocked capital.

Warsame, a quiet kid, was born in Mogadishu, but moved to Nashville, Tenn., in 1989, when he was 3, so that his mother could pursue a master’s degree in economics.

One year later, Somalia was in the grips of civil war and Adan, who is 63, brought her three boys to Toronto, joining her sister and brother. “We came here because we didn’t have a place to go back to,” she says. The family applied for refugee status and began building a life with little. Hussein joined them one year later.

The family first lived in an apartment in the Silverstone area of Rexdale, near Jamestown, where Warsame was shot.

Both parents struggled to find jobs, but Hussein, who is now 67, eventually took up a post helping to find at-risk youth employment. Adan, having studied social work at York University, began counselling abused women.

In 2001, they bought a two-storey home in Vaughan. Back then, the area was nothing but farmland and so the family watched it morph over the years into subdivisions and shopping complexes in the shadow of Canada’s Wonderland.

While their two older boys, Ahmed, 29, and Mahad, 30, didn’t keep ties to the neighbourhood where they spent their early years, Warsame, described by Ahmed as “loyal to a fault,” did.

The family didn’t know Suleiman, described by his sister Fadumo as “the light of the family,” well. They had met him only a few times. But they believe Warsame knew him from those childhood ties.

Both men knew Abdulaziz Farah, 28, killed just two weeks before them, according to their families. After Farah’s death, Warsame lamented to his brother: “It’s always good people dying.”

After graduating from high school, Warsame wanted to be a police officer, and tried his hand at a police foundations course at Seneca. He had every intention of going back to school to study social work, says his family.

“The week before he was murdered, we were chatting and he said, ‘You know, Dad, the past is past and I’m looking forward to the future,’ ” says his father, Hussein, a man who talks often of forgiveness and prevention.

“Those were his words.”

Most recently, Warsame was commuting to Montreal for work, distributing yellow pages and coupons. He wanted to get married, to have a family.

Every night since her son’s death, Adan wakes up at 1 a.m., around the same time the 911 calls reporting gunshots came in.

“It’s like a clock goes off in my brain,” she says, holding back tears. “Then my eyes open and I can’t go to sleep.” Her son’s words, “I love you,” words not often uttered in her culture, plays on a loop in her head.

“I ask myself what I did wrong. Every parent asks themselves that question when their child is not there anymore,” says Adan. “That guilt shouldn’t be with me only. It should be with the three levels of government.”

The women of Positive Change, the group Adan and others in the Somali-Canadian community began just months ago, are tireless and resourceful, and are only just gearing up.

“We started three months ago, not knowing that it will hit us so close,” says group member Faduma Mohamed, a formidable force herself, of Adan’s loss.

“But we will continue. This tragedy will not depress us or stop us.”

Unlike other Somali-Canadian groups that offer services like youth mentoring or programs for new immigrants, the women, bolstered by men and young people from the community, as well as former Toronto School Board trustee Bruce Davis, have their sights set on the corridors of power — the decision makers at the schools, at police headquarters and at every level of government.

The barriers for Toronto’s nearly 80,000 Somalis, as well as thousands more in Ottawa and Alberta, are simply too large for the community to solve on their own. For years, they’ve been asking for help, and no one has been listening, the women say.

The unemployment rate for Somali-Canadians is above 20 per cent, the highest of any ethnic group. About 35 per cent of young people drop out of high school. “When a kid is dropped out from school and not working, where do you think he goes?” asks Adan.

The bloodletting is not new, either. Since 2005, more than two dozen Somali-Canadian men have been murdered in Alberta, caught up in a deadly drug trade. “Most of the Alberta kids are Toronto kids,” says Mohamed of the lure of fast money for those who can’t find employment.

(Hussein Hussein, 28, killed in an upscale apartment building in Toronto’s north end in June, had spent time in Fort McMurray, Alta., according to police.)

Vulnerable youth have also been co-opted by radicalism. In 2009, several young people fled to Somalia to join Al Shabab, an Islamist youth militia aligned with Al Qaeda.

“We talk with everyone who has sympathy for us, but no one is taking the first action,” says Mohamed, wagging her finger.

In an effort to spur that action, the women have recently been showing up in politicians’ offices unannounced and armed with whistles. They want an emergency summit, something that would bring key players from all realms together, and they need champions for their cause.

They seem to have found one in Dr. Eric Hoskins, Ontario’s Minister of Children and Youth. On Wednesday, Hoskins sat down with Adan and Mohamed, as well as other partners in the Somali community, and listened to her story.

On Friday, he told the Star in no uncertain terms that he is committed to working with the community and convening and hosting a summit at the end of November.

He added that it’s “critically important” that representatives from the federal government and the city, as well as the education, settlement and justice sectors, are all there to meet with the community.

“It’s heart-wrenching to see how this incredible community of individuals ... how they’re struggling with something as tragic and difficult as the loss of so many of their sons,” says Hoskins, who once lived and worked in Somalia as a doctor.

The Toronto District School Board and Toronto police are two big targets on the group’s checklist.

Two weeks ago, when TDSB head Dr. Chris Spence was a no-show to a meeting the group had asked for and sent his staff instead, Adan, along with dozens of other Somali women, showed up at a trustee meeting with their whistles the next night.

Spence sat down with them right then and there, and promised to meet them again next month.

Somali-Canadian kids — boys, in particular — are dropping out of high school at four times the national average. Students who speak Somali and Spanish have the lowest rate of graduation, according to a TDSB study following a cohort of grade 9s over five years.

Farhia Abdi, a Somali-Canadian woman who recently completed a thesis on the subject for York University’s masters of education program, says she believes the school board is failing in its mandate

“The statistics are shocking,” she says, adding that the problem begins in elementary school.

The data, she says, show that about 60 per cent of kids are coming into high schools performing below average in reading, writing, math and science, with many failing.

There are issues with an overrepresentation of Somali-Canadian kids in special education programs, she says. As well, students are being ushered into applied streams, which prevent them from applying to university. The relationship between parents and schools are strained, partly because parents who grew up in Somalia know nothing of the concept of suspensions, and don’t have the wherewithal to navigate the system.

Many of the students Abdi interviewed for her research said they felt like the schools were trying to kick them out.

“They’re demoralized,” she says.

The women of Positive Change want a task force similar to the one Portuguese-speaking students, who have only a slightly higher dropout rate, got last year.

On Thursday, Jim Spyropoulos, the board’s co-ordinating superintendent of inclusive schools, said this is “an urgent, urgent situation and it’s not lost on us at all.

“We need to do better.”

Work has been done, he said, mentioning a Somali-parent liaison committee. Four Somali community support workers have been hired, and the board has actively been recruiting Somali teens for their Focus on Youth program.

Somali was recently added to a list of languages on the school board’s website, he said.

When asked about the task force, Spyropoulos referred to a recent meeting with board trustees, who have the power to create a task force, and members of the Somali-Canadian community.

“There’s definitely, I believe, a good understanding that we will be working with the community to establish a task force,” said trustee Maria Rodrigues, who was at that meeting.

As for the cops, the women wonder why there is only one Somali officer employed by the Toronto police. For a force that prides itself on, and has won awards for, its diversity, it’s a good question.

Mohamed refers to work done by police in Minneapolis, who have attributed reduction in crime to the efforts of two Somali officers who were once refugees. They have been able to connect with a community that may be distrustful of any authority because they come from a country rife with corruption and abuse.

Adan’s son Ahmed recently applied to police college, went through a series of tests and interviews, and was then told by a recruiting officer there was a hiring freeze, she says.

Sgt. Mandeep Mann of Toronto police’s divisional police support unit, said Friday: “In terms of employment, there is work for us to do. And we are actively working on it.”

The Toronto Police Services Board has recently authorized the hiring of more officers, Mann said, adding police have identified about 20 Somali youth and will encourage them to apply to police college, and assist with mentors if they choose to go through the admission process.

The women say they have heard empty promises before.

In the last few years, community members say they have had conversations with police Chief Bill Blair and the board’s Jim Spyropoulos and nothing has happened.

They’re skeptical, but their resolve has been hardened.

On Sunday, after handing out flyers in Jamestown, Adan headed to a meeting for Positive Change.

“Now we have a group that will not stop until systemic change will happen on every level,” she says.

Habiba Adan, whose son Warsame Ali was shot and killed on Sept.18, is seen Sunday with a Somali group that is advocating for change in their community in Toronto.

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