By ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS
Associated Press Writer
COLUMBUS, Ohio- Farah Warsame helps his sisters run a restaurant and clothing store in the hopes of making it in his adopted country.
His belief in the American way added urgency to his voice as he joined hundreds of other Somali immigrants who rallied Friday outside City Hall to protest the fatal police shooting of a man they said was mentally ill.
“We need justice and peace,” said Warsame, 30, who came to Columbus about five years ago. “We’re taxpayers, we’re like any other people.”
Nasir Abdi, 23, was shot Wednesday as four Franklin County sheriff’s deputies tried to take him back to a mental hospital where he had been force-fed medications.
Columbus police detectives said Deputy Jason Evans, a seven-year veteran, shot Abdi after he threatened the deputies with a kitchen knife that had a 6-inch (15-centimeter) blade.
But Somali leaders said witnesses to the shooting never saw a knife in Abdi’s hands.
“This young man was killed when in fact he was supposed to be protected by the authorities,” said Liibaan Ismail of Columbus, a spokesman for the hundreds gathered outside City Hall.
The crowd alternated between standing in front of City Hall and marching around two city blocks chanting and yelling, “We want justice!”
Protesters held signs with statements such as, “Nasir Abdi needed medication, not a bullet.”
Bashir Mohamud, a 23-year-old biomedical engineer student, came to the protest because he thought Abdi shouldn’t have died.
“The police just shot him without reason. I believe they could have saved him instead of killing him,” said Mohamud, an Ohio State University student who came to Columbus from Somalia about three years ago.
While the sheriff’s office was familiar with Abdi and his mental health problems, Evans was probably not, Sheriff Jim Karnes said Friday.
Karnes said that didn’t matter to how Evans and other officers handled the shooting.
“They know how to do the job, they know what they’re supposed to do, they know what they have to do to protect themselves and the public,” he said.
Karnes said his officers have taken only the minimum training in dealing with mentally ill suspects required by the state.
“Unless it’s mandated by the state, we probably don’t have enough time or money to do it,” Karnes said. “Training costs money.”
A consultant to several police departments around Ohio says the more training officers have in working with the mentally ill, the less likely it is that police and troubled suspects will be hurt.
Michael Woody, a retired Akron police officer, conducts the training at police departments with a grant through the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine.
Since 2000, more than 1,500 officers around the state and 125 police officers in Franklin County have taken the training, including 112 Columbus police officers, but no Franklin County officers, Woody said.
“We need the extra training because obviously people with mental illness and officers are unnecessarily losing their lives and being injured,” he said.
Actions police normally take to subdue suspects can often make things worse with mentally ill people, he said.
Woody said in the Abdi case it appeared police showed restraint by trying to use a chemical irritant spray first.
But such sprays often don’t work well with highly upset individuals or those with mental illness and are not as preferable as equipment such as stun guns, he said.
None of the Franklin County officers carried stun guns, which are touted as a nonlethal option for law enforcement, because they had not been trained with the weapons yet.
The crisis training is a priority for a state Supreme Court committee studying the mentally ill and the court system.
“You can’t deal with a mentally ill person like you can with a person who is rational,” state Supreme Court Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton said Friday. “They don’t think the same way. They’re in a delusion.”
Abdi and his family emigrated from Somalia to the United States in 1999, living first in Tennessee before moving to Columbus in 2000.
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On the Net:
Franklin County Sheriff’s Office: http://www.sheriff.franklin.oh.us/
Supreme Court Advisory Committee on Mentally Ill in the Courts: http://www.sconet.state.oh.us/ACMIC/