The Children Are Not OK: Tragedy In Kentucky

There has been a recent spike of violence in the Somali Diaspora against Somali women.

On or about October 19, 2010, a Somali man allegedly killed his wife in Norway and then stuffed her body into the trunk of their car. The man proceeded to use the car for his daily errands, including driving their young sons, ages 5 and 4, to school. Four months later, when the car broke down, the Norwegian police discovered the frozen body of his wife.

In 2009, another Somali man, Mustafa Farah, 51, who was living in the United Kingdom, allegedly strangled his young bride, Naima Mohamed Moalim, 31, only three days after she had arrived from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to join him.

In 2009, In Kansas City, Missouri, Hussein A. Ahmed, 27, was charged with molesting his stepdaughter and then killing his wife, Halimo Ahmed, 49. Mr. Ahmed had married his late brother‘s wife and was raising his nephews and nieces. According to court documents, Ahmed allegedly started molesting his stepdaughter in 2004, when she was 12, and impregnated her by the time she was 14.

Each of these cases will be examined separately in future articles. In this piece, a grim tale of physical and psychological violence in Kentucky will be addressed.
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It was Friday morning, October 6th, 2006, when Said Biyad, a Somali Bantu immigrant, walked into the Louisville Metro Police headquarters and calmly told homicide detectives, “I just killed my family”.

The family consisted of his estranged wife, Fatuma Amir, 29, and their four children; Sidi, age eight, Fatuma, age seven, Khadija, age four, and Goshany, who was only two years old. The wife survived but the children were found dead, their throats slashed with a hunting knife.

In a taped police interview that would later haunt him, Mr. Biyad, 42, provided a motive for the violence he had inflicted upon his family. He said that his wife had disrespected him. Mr. Biyad would later enter a plea of “not guilty” during his arraignment.

According to Louisville Police, the murders were the results of an argument between Biyad and his wife over the children. Biyad told the police that he had forced his wife to have sex with him, and then he hit her twice with a hammer. When his wife regained consciousness, Biyad approached her with a knife, but she managed to run to one of the bedrooms and lock the door. It was then that Biyad allegedly killed his four children; two were in bed and the other two were in the kitchen. Gail Norris, a deputy coroner with the Jefferson County Medical Examiner’s Office, declared that the Biyad children were stabbed to death and that the older ones showed defensive wounds on their hands and arms.

In broken English, Biyad told the police, “I cried and wash my hands in the kitchen. I said, ‘What am I doing?’ Where am I supposed to go? I don’t know.” He pleaded to the police, “please arrest me…It is not right, I did bad things. It’s not right.”

Louisville detectives initially thought that Biyad was crazy because of his calm admission of a graphic and grisly crime. At times, his account was incoherent due to a language barrier. A detective called dispatch and asked that a police unit go out and check the well-being of Biyad’s family and added “I am here with a guy….He is claiming that he killed his wife and kids, but it might, I think, it’s gonna be a CIT situation”. CIT refers to the police department’s crisis intervention unit which deals with the mentally ill. But when the patrol unit went to Fatuma Amir’s apartment, they found a blood path.

This case has been going on for more than four years. There have been numerous pretrial, competency, and status hearings, and one motion hearing. The trial has been continued numerous times. The latest delay came on January 27, when the trial was pushed back once again—from February 8 to April 18. The reason: Mr. Biyad’s “medical condition”.

Mental Competency

One of the main contentious issues of the Biyad case is his mental competency. Was Said Biyad insane when he allegedly committed such heinous crimes? Is he mentally fit to stand trial?
Biyad’s attorney has attempted to use the insanity defense but the prosecutors have argued otherwise.

So far, there are two conflicting assessments of Mr. Biyad’s mental competency. According to psychologist Greg Perri, Biyad, once a patient at Kentucky Correctional Psychiatric Center, had shown signs of irrationality and delusion but he later improved. There was a time, according to Dr. Perri, when Biyad refused to cooperate with the staff unless certain visitors, including his wife, were allowed to visit him. There were other times that Biyad said little or kept talking incessantly about issues that were not pertinent to the topic at hand. But as time went by, according to Dr. Perri, Biyad’s symptoms of delusion and irrationality began to fade away. Dr. Perri concluded that Biyad was mentally fit.

But Dr. Wayne Herner, a psychologist with the Kentucky Department of Corrections, had a

different assessment of Biyad. He saw signs of schizophrenia in Biyad. Dr. Herner argued that Biyad was delusional and barely scored above what is generally considered to be mentally disabled on a competency test. “He is a very disturbed individual,” said Dr. Herner. “I didn’t see any evidence that would lead me to believe he can make rational decisions.”

Among Biyad’s delusions are his belief that he is a multimillionaire and a man “with celebrity status” who is being chased by four men who want to kill him. Biyad also claimed, according to Dr. Herner’s court testimony, that his own attorney was a policeman who wanted to trick him. Another time, Biyad claimed that Arabs were trying to track him and kill him.

Judge James Shake has been assigned to hear his case and will issue a verdict. The Judge has already ruled twice that the defendant was competent to stand trial. That means Biyad knows the nature and object of the court proceedings and the potential penalties he faces if found guilty. Biyad has opted for a bench trial, which means Judge Shake will serve as both judge and jury.

Videotaped Statements

Another pertinent issue about the Biyad case is his initial interview with the police which was taped and presented to the court as evidence. Biyad’s lawyer filed a motion to suppress his client’s recorded confessions, and brought up the issue of the defendant’s limited knowledge of English, but to no avail.

To the government, Biyad‘s crime is an open and shut case; the defendant murdered his own children, raped his wife, and then assaulted her with a blunt object. Moreover, Biyad himself admitted the crime. While the government plans to present other evidence, Biyad’s own statements, which are damning and incriminating, will play a crucial role in his fate.

Death Penalty
The prosecutors of the Biyad case are asking for the death penalty if the defendant is found guilty. The charges against Biyad are murder, attempted murder, rape and assault. Not every murder case in Kentucky is eligible for the death penalty. It is only murders with aggravating circumstances that the death penalty is applied. In Biyad’s case, there are potentially two aggravating circumstances: the use of a weapon that could be hazardous to more than one person and the intentional murder of more than one person.

The United States is only one of several developed countries that have capital punishment (Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea being the others). The American public has constantly supported capital punishment. In a poll by Gallop conducted in October 2009, 65 percent of Americans supported the death penalty for individuals convicted of murder, while 31 percent were against it, and 5 percent did not have an opinion.
In the State of Kentucky, there are already 39 inmates on the death row. About 30 of them are
Whites, 8 are Black, and 1 is Hispanic.

For Biyad’s case, the issue of death penalty and his mental competency, once again, will surface, if he is found guilty. Prosecutors offered Biyad a plea; plead guilty to murder and serve life without the possibility of parole. But Biyad rejected the offer.

Politics

To what extent does politics play in the Biyad case?

Judge Shake is an elected and experienced judicial officer. He was, until a year ago, the Chief Circuit Court of Jefferson County. He is very popular among Louisville lawyers who practice in the Jefferson County Courts. In a poll done by the Louisville Bar Association in May 2009, Judge Shake received the highest approval rating from lawyers—97 percent. It was, however, two points lower than the ranking he got in 2006. “I don’t know of an elected official who wouldn’t be thrilled with that kind of approval rating,” he told the Louisville Courier_Journal.

The role politics plays in judicial trials is often difficult to gauge. Judges like Shake, however, hold elected office. Two years ago, Shake narrowly lost a bid to become Justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court. His current position is up for re-election in 2014.

Remembering the Kids

The Somalis in Louisville and residents of that city were appalled by the killings of the Biyad children. Fatuma Amir, their mother, according to a community member and a friend of her family, was inconsolable.

Fatuma and her children had been living in Louisville since 2005 after she apparently left her husband under cloudy circumstances. She and Biyad came to the United States as refugees in 2004 and were settled in Portland, Oregon.

Said Biyad and his wife had a volatile relationship, and there is a case in Oregon of domestic violence referral. One day, according to public records, the couple had a verbal argument and the police were eventually called in and Fatuma was taken to the emergency room for drinking Bleach. It is not clear whether Said Biyad forced his wife to drink Bleach or what the circumstance was that led to her consumption of the chemical. Fatuma Amir decided to leave Oregon, along with her children, and settled in Louisville. Biyad stayed behind in Portland.

According to court documents, Biyad told the Louisville police that his wife had invited him several weeks before the murders to come to Kentucky so they could reconcile. Fatuma Amir was living in Iroquois Homes, a dangerous public housing project, in which many crimes take place. Iroquois Homes was once featured in the popular crime show, “The First 48 Hours”. The reconciliation apparently did not work as Biyad complained that he was treated with disrespect by his wife. There were instances where he was forced to sleep away from the apartment. The cause of the murders precipitated a deluge of rumors and gossip in the Somali community. The tricky thing about the couple’s union is parsing facts from fiction. According to court transcripts, the couple had disagreements about their children. Moreover, Biyad told the police that his wife had threatened to lock him up.

Goshany was a toddler and stayed home, and Khadija attended a preschool program at Dawson Orman Educational Center. Sidi and Fatuma were students at Stonestreet Elementary School. According to the school principal, Carol Bartlett, Sidi and Fatuma were “sweet, loving, precious children” and that they would be missed. When asked about the children’s academic performance, the principal said, “I could not have gone to another country and done as well as they did”.

Christopher 2X (that is his real name) is a well-known community activist in Louisville and is the Founder of FIGHT CRIME AGAINST CHILDREN Partnership. He has been concerned about the loss of the Biyad children and the lack of remorse on the part of Biyad. To Christopher, Biyad had confessed the crime to the police but now he is singing a different tune. Christopher 2X pointed out a statement made by Biyad in court denying the killings. Biyad, in that hearing, was flanked by two court interpreters, but he spoke in plain English and stated that he did not kill his children and that someone else committed the crime. “I loved my children,” Biyad added.

There was once an American Social Worker in California with long and varied experience in working with different refugee communities. She had travelled extensively in the world and found the Somalis to be highly unique. “What amazes me about Somalis,” she once told this writer, “is how every time I meet them, the first question they ask me is ‘how are the children’”. Unfortunately, for the Biyad family, the children are anything but all right.