A reluctant witness in gang-related shooting trial

By Brandt Williams
Saturday, May 31, 2014

Mohamed Omar, 21, walked slowly to the witness stand Friday morning in Hennepin County District Court slightly favoring his right leg.

Prosecutors called Omar to the stand so that he could testify against the man authorities say shot him in that leg and several other parts of his body last Sept. 22. Omar, however, had no intention of playing along.

According to prosecutors, 25-year-old Zakaria Abdinasser Yusuf, also known as "T-Dot," approached Omar outside a corner grocery store on West Lake Street and fired at least five shots into him. They charged Yusuf with two counts of attempted murder, two counts of assault and one count of illegal possession of a firearm.

The shooting, which police say is gang related, was one of a number of violent confrontations between young Somali men to occur in Minneapolis that year.

When defense attorney Fred Goetz asked Omar if Yusuf shot him, Omar said, "I've never seen that guy before in my life."

"The guy who shot me was named 'T-Dawg,'" Omar said.

The Hennepin County Attorney's Office originally charged Yusuf with attempted murder for the benefit of a gang, but officials say they later dropped that charge because they didn't think they had enough evidence to prove the charge beyond a reasonable doubt.

Prosecutors say Omar had the best look at Yusuf during the shooting.

In her opening statement, assistant Hennepin County Attorney Vicki Vial Taylor said police didn't recover the gun involved in the shooting. She also said Yusuf left no fingerprints or DNA at the scene. But Taylor said Yusuf did leave his image behind in surveillance camera footage and witnesses saw him there.

However, a witness who was in her minivan waiting at a stoplight outside the store when the shooting started, said the gunman was wearing a gray, hooded sweatshirt and she didn't see much of his face.

Omar has been a reluctant witness. The state tried to prosecute Yusuf earlier this year, but had to drop the case when Omar skipped out of testifying at the previous trial.

This time, Hennepin County Sheriff's deputies arrested Omar and placed him on electronic home monitoring to secure his testimony and prosecutors issued a subpoena ordering him to the courtroom.

Taylor showed Omar copies of police reports containing his description of the gunman as "T-Dot," and his signature on a photo sheet identifying Yusuf as the shooter. But Omar testified that he doesn't remember giving the statements and said the officers must have misunderstood him when he told them the nickname of his assailant.

In his opening statement on Thursday, Goetz said Yusuf could not have shot Omar because he was at home in St. Paul with his family at the time. Goetz plans on calling members of Yusuf's family who were home with him to testify during the trial.

Yusuf's father, Abdinasser Yusuf, said he was in Canada at the time his son was arrested for the shooting. But the elder Yusuf said his son told him he's innocent, and he believes him. "He's always calm and nice at home," Yusuf said.

Zakaria Yusuf is the second of six children and was born in Somalia, his father said. He came to the United States via Canada when he was three years old.

"We left Somalia because there was lots of guns and chaos there," the elder Yusuf said. "We came here to change our lives."

When asked if his son is in a gang, Yusuf said he doesn't think so, but added that he is not aware of everything his son does when he leaves the house. He acknowledged his son has been arrested before. In 2010, Zakaria Yusuf was convicted of two felonies: receiving stolen property and second-degree assault.

The trial is expected to continue into next week. A second man, Farhan Hersi, 26, has been charged as an accomplice in the shooting and is scheduled to go on trial next month.

According to the police, both Hersi and Yusuf are members of a Somali gang called Maadiban with Attitude and Mohamed Omar is a member of the Somali Outlaws.

The two gangs, police say, have been embroiled in a bloody conflict in recent years. According to court documents, just a few weeks before Omar was shot at the corner grocery store on Lake Street, three members of the Somali Outlaws were wounded outside of a Minneapolis cafe near downtown.

Police say the suspected shooter or shooters were members of a gang allied with Maadiban with Attitude, called the St. Paul Pistol Boys.

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