SOMALI REFUGEE ON THE RUN
AFTER 'MURDER ATTEMPT' IN U.S.,Attorney fretted
over fair jury after Trump executive order, by Leo Hohmann, 3/1/17, WND
A Somali man who came to America as
a child refugee has jumped bail and remains at large after being charged with
attempted murder in Aberdeen, South Dakota.
Abdirhman Ahmad Noor, 24, is charged
with two counts of attempted murder and two counts of aggravated assault for
allegedly shooting at two men on July 8 in or near the parking lot of the
Foxridge Apartments in Aberdeen. Noor was said to have chased the two men down,
firing at them. One man, Dar’na Tansmore, was hit and laid wounded on the
ground when Noor allegedly walked up, stood over his victim and shot him again.
Tansmore was taken to a hospital in
Sioux Falls and survived. Police have not given a motive for the shooting. About half of the residents at the
Foxridge Apartments are Somalis, according to Aberdeen residents. The July
shooting was followed by another incident involving a drive-by shooting in
early September in which no arrests have been made. On Aug. 14, another
incident took place just south of the apartments when a man identified as Ehkhu
Poe allegedly charged a police officer with a knife and was shot twice but survived
to face charges.
Some residents told the local paper
they want to move, while others said they live in fear and keep their doors
locked all the time.
Noor was scheduled to appear in
circuit court in Aberdeen Tuesday for a pre-trial hearing, but he failed to
appear. A bench warrant was issued for his arrest. Just before 6 p.m. Eastern
on Wednesday, the Brown County Jail confirmed to WND that Noor was still not
incarcerated there.
His attorneys had also filed a
motion to suppress information Noor gave to local police, arguing that English
was his second language, according to court documents.
Lutheran Social Services South
Dakota has been paid by the federal government to resettle 947 Somali refugees
in South Dakota since 2002. Most are sent to the cities of Sioux Falls and
Huron, but some make secondary migration to Aberdeen to work in the meatpacking
and molded fiberglass plants there.
More than 132,000 Somali refugees
have been resettled in more than 200 U.S. cities and towns since civil war broke
out in Somalia in 1991. Somali refugees have recently been implicated in
terrorist knife attacks on the campus of Ohio State University on Nov. 28 and
at the Crossroads Mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on Sept. 17 last year. Eleven
were wounded at Ohio State and 10 were wounded in the St. Cloud attack.
Noor has pleaded not guilty to the
charges. Judge Jon Flemmer set Noor’s bond at $50,000 cash, after the state’s
attorney requested it be set at $400,000. Noor was incarcerated for nearly
three months, from July 8 to Oct. 11, at which time his family came up with the
$50,000 cash bond and he was freed pending trial on March 15. But that’s
unlikely to happen now since no one can find Noor, who became a U.S. citizen
about eight years ago, county officials told WND.
Aberdeen’s local newspaper, the
American New, made
no mention in its story Wednesday of
Noor’s status as a Somali refugee. The same paper did not cover the trial of
another Somali refugee, 39-year-old Liban Mohamed, who was convicted in
December of attempted sexual assault against a mentally incapacitated woman at
a group home in Aberdeen. After
WND reported on the conviction, the
American News did publish an article but buried it on Page 3 and did not
mention that the sex crime was committed by a Somali refugee.
Worried
about Trump’s executive order
In a pretrial motion filed Feb. 10,
Noor’s attorney, William Gerdes, expressed concerns about getting a fair trial
for his client in the wake of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order
listing Somalia as one of seven terror-prone Muslim countries that needed a
temporary travel ban until better vetting systems could be developed. Gerdes
asked the court for permission to privately ask certain questions of the jury pool
to query their opinions related to Trump’s action.
“Defendant was born in Somalia,”
Gerdes writes in the motion for supplemental confidential juror questionnaire.
“On January 27, 2017, the President of the United States of America issued an
Executive Order, which proclaims that ‘the immigrant and non-immigrant entry
into the United States of aliens from [Somalia] would be detrimental to the
interests of the United States.’ Our President, has temporarily suspended the
entry into the United States by Somalians.” Meanwhile, some in South Dakota are
growing weary of the growing refugee presence and the resulting crimes.
State Sen. Neal Tapio, the former
state director for Trump’s campaign in South Dakota, introduced
a resolution in the State Senate that
cleared out of committee Wednesday after an hours-long hearing in which tearful
refugees testified about their lives in the state. The resolution calls on the
state to give a vote of “no confidence” to the refugee resettlement program
until President Donald Trump has a chance to implement extreme vetting.
James Simpson, author of the “Red
Green Axis” and an expert on the refugee resettlement industry, noted that in
the wake of Trump’s executive order, media pundits and refugee advocates
repeated the mantra that no refugee from any of the seven countries has killed
anyone.
“Refugee advocates constantly claim
that no refugee has killed anyone. But that is a calculated misdirection,”
Simpson wrote in a recent
op-ed for the Daily Caller. “There
have been plenty who have tried.
Since 9-11, there have been 580
terror plots in the U.S. and at least 380 were foreign-born and at least 40
were refugees.” And that doesn’t even include the non-terrorist
violent crimes.
http://www.wnd.com/2017/03/somali-refugee-on-the-run-after-murder-attempt/
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