Double homicide on Lake Street

BY ED FELIEN

On Friday night, April 11, at about 9:30 p.m., Minneapolis police found the bodies of two Somali men, Dahir Ahmed Abdirahman, 29, and Tahany Abdi Omar Erbob, 24, in a car parked in a parking lot behind an apartment building near Lake and 29th Avenue in the Longfellow neighborhood. They were dead as the result of multiple gunshot wounds.
Abdirahman was recently released from prison for a 2008 conviction for felony robbery, simple robbery and terroristic threats.
It seems reasonable to suspect that the two deaths are the latest casualties in the gang war between the Somali Outlaws and the Madhibaan with Attitude, or MWA. They’ve had a longstanding rivalry stretching back years. The term Madhibaan refers to lower caste Somalis, so the gang affiliation would be similar to NWA (Niggers With Attitude), popular with African Americans a decade ago.
Last year was a bloody summer for the gang war. In August in Burnsville, a gunman injured one man and killed 23-year-old Abdifatah Mahumod. On the Fourth of July, Muhyadin Farah was shot and killed inside an apartment at Lake Street and Grand Avenue in South Minneapolis. A month before, Mohamed Aden was shot to death while sitting in his car outside a party at University and Lowry Avenues in Northeast, and in late August, a Somali man was killed and his body found in Shoreview.
On Monday, April 14, Somali community leaders held a meeting to discuss the problem at the Brian Coyle Community Center in Cedar Riverside. The organizers of the meeting were frustrated with the lack of progress by the police in solving these murders. Neither the mayor, or Council Member Abdi Warsame or the Minneapolis police were at the meeting. MPR reported that former Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, who began educating law enforcement officials about Somali culture following his election loss in 2010, criticized the MPD for its lack of outreach to the Somali community. Their “absence at this meeting was glaring.”