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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Mon May 16 2011 - 07:49:56 EDT
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_18066347?nclick_check=1 Rival
Eritrean families await verdict in triple homicide
By Matt O'Brien and Paul T. Rosynsky
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 05/14/2011 08:01:54 PM PDT
Updated: 05/15/2011 01:11:51 PM PDT
OAKLAND -- Glances harden into glares in the hallway outside Judge Vernon
Nakahara's courtroom.
The Gebreselassie family gathers on weekday mornings on one side of the
foyer. The Meharis carefully avoid them, gravitating toward the other side.
A bailiff guides them into the courtroom separately, first one big family
and their supporters, then the other.
Their feud is deep, and complicated, but at its crux is the death of a
Gebreselassie brother in March 2006 and a holiday shooting 11 months later
that left three Meharis dead, two Gebreselassies charged with their slayings
and a 2-year-old boy orphaned by the violence.
The two families that once spent holidays together and helped each other
gain U.S. citizenship now share an uneasy proximity in the fifth-floor
courtroom of the Alameda County Courthouse, waiting for a verdict that, no
matter the result, will bring anguish to at least one side of the aisle.
In the broader Eritrean immigrant community of which the Meharis and
Gebreselassies are a part, memories of the 2006 tragedy linger and many
share the hope that a verdict will bring some closure.
"It's taken a toll on a lot of people," said Aron Tsegaye, a member of North
Oakland's Eritrean Orthodox Tewahdo Church, where the surviving Meharis
remain devoted congregants. "A lot of us pray about it, so God can give his
answers."
The 2006 tragedy was the worst to befall members of the East Bay's Eritrean
community,
who began settling in North Oakland and other parts of the Bay Area in the
early 1980s and now number in the thousands. Many of them fled war and
political turmoil -- a 30-year armed struggle ended with Eritrea's
independence from Ethiopia in 1993 -- but familial violence on the scale of
what happened in Oakland on Thanksgiving Day 2006 was alien to them. News of
the Oakland triple homicide spread across North America's Eritrean diaspora
and back to Eritrea itself.
Thanksgiving 2006
What happened Nov. 23, 2006, remains in dispute as a jury begins
deliberations this week on charges that Asmerom Gebreselassie killed three
people, tried to kill one other and kidnapped his 2-year-old nephew. Asmerom
Gebreselassie's brother, Tewodros, is on trial for the same crimes because
prosecutors say he helped Asmerom Gebreselassie enter the apartment where
the shootings occurred.
The brothers could face life in prison without parole, but not the death
penalty, if convicted.
Deputy district attorney Joni Leventis has argued that an entire family --
the Meharis -- was the target of Asmerom Gebreselassie's gunfire. He would
likely have killed more than three Mehari family members in the Thanksgiving
shooting, she argued, had they not charged at him and disarmed him amid the
melee.
Asmerom Gebreselassie, however, claims he was lured to the Mehari family
home that holiday afternoon on a promise to discuss a sensitive issue that
had preoccupied him for months: his suspicion that the death of his
42-year-old brother, Abraham Gebreselassie, that year was murder and that
the Meharis were responsible for it. He said he was forced to shoot at the
Meharis after two Mehari brothers drew guns on him. Only two guns were
recovered from the scene of the crime, both of which police tied to Asmerom
Gebreselassie.
The first person killed was 17-year-old Yonas Mehari, a popular student and
soccer player at Berkeley High School. The next was the teen's mother, Regbe
Bahrengasi, 50, the Mehari family matriarch who was a quiet fixture of the
local Eritrean community and its Orthodox church.
The last person killed was her daughter, 28-year-old Winta Mehari, who
linked the two families because she was the widow of Abraham Gebreselassie,
the brother whose unexplained March 2006 death had angered the Gebreselassie
family. Her death orphaned the couple's son, now 6, who lives with the
Meharis but became the subject of a custody battle between the families
after the shooting. According to evidence presented at trial, Winta Mehari
was shot dead as she ran toward Asmerom Gebreselassie as he was blocking the
front door and firing 11 bullets into the one-bedroom apartment.
Two other Mehari brothers were injured in the shootings. One was shot in the
ankle and another jumped from the third-story apartment to escape the
carnage, landing on a paved courtyard. A third Mehari brother ran out from
the apartment complex onto Telegraph Avenue, begging passing drivers, many
of whom were on their way to Thanksgiving dinner celebrations, to call for
help.
The neighborhood
Some residents of the Temescal district, the hub of the Bay Area's Eritrean
community, have devoted the past 16 weeks to keeping up with the trial.
Elder women, draped in the traditional white netela cloth of their East
African homeland, take a morning bus ride from the Temescal to the
courthouse near Lake Merritt.
They spend their day listening to the testimony and lending moral support to
their chosen side. Other families have expressed their support, especially
to the family of the victims, by catering traditional Eritrean meals at the
courthouse at lunchtime. Many others take pains not to get involved in the
dispute.
"That's a family problem, not a community problem," said Temesgen Yohannes,
owner of the Asmarina Cafe in North Oakland. "But the community is sad about
it. It's like we're a big family."
On a recent afternoon, as Yohannes brewed espresso at his Shattuck Avenue
shop, a few of the men playing cards at a corner table were Gebreselassies.
The defendants and their relatives, like the Meharis, were fixtures in a
community whose members commonly run into one another at weddings, festivals
and the sidewalks and cafes of North Oakland.
Asmerom Gebreselassie, the admitted shooter, was a Las Vegas taxi driver who
joined his extended family in Oakland only after his younger brother
Abraham's unexplained death. But he was well-known in the neighborhood as a
man who spoke his mind about politics and other affairs. A boisterous and
opinionated conversationalist, the 47-year-old was the oldest of 11
siblings, most of whom lived in the Bay Area, and he frequently patronized
Temescal neighborhood spots such as the Red Sea and Asmara restaurants.
His younger brother, Tewodros Gebreselassie, 43, the man accused of helping
to commit the crime, worked as a computer application designer in Silicon
Valley before moving back to Eritrea. He created a university there to help
the country's younger generation gain technological knowledge before moving
back to the Bay Area after Abraham's death in 2006.
Simmering family feud
The familial rupture between the Meharis and Gebreselassies began long
before the Thanksgiving shooting. Tensions were rooted in the unexplained
March 2006 death of mechanic Abraham Gebreselassie, who owned a tuneup shop
on Broadway's Auto Row.
Abraham Gebreselassie was the glue that held together the two families. His
marriage to Winta Mehari in 2004 surprised the Gebreselassie family, court
testimony revealed, but she and her family were swiftly welcomed into the
Gebreselassie clan.
Family members say Abraham and Tewodros Gebreselassie, already
well-established in the United States, worked hard to ensure the extended
Mehari family could gain entry into the country. Abraham supplied the cash
needed for visas and airfare while Tewodros worked with U.S. Embassy
officials in Eritrea to help them obtain green cards.
"Prior to Abraham's death, we were not treating them as in-laws, but as
family," Asmerom Gebreselassie testified in the trial. "In general, I would
testify, that both families never had problems."
But Abraham's death in the early-morning hours of March 1, 2006, changed
everything.
The auto mechanic died in the couple's South Berkeley home of what family
members assumed was a heart attack. A coroner found that the cause of death
was unexplained.
The death haunted both families.
"Angry and sorry that I didn't tell my husband often enough how much I truly
loved him," Winta Mehari wrote in a computer diary after his death.
Asmerom Gebreselassie, however, grew increasingly convinced that foul play
was involved in the death of his brother. He moved back to Oakland from Las
Vegas and began snooping for clues.
His growing suspicion, according to his testimony, was that his
sister-in-law and the rest of her family conspired to poison Abraham to
conceal a Mehari brother's homosexuality, a cultural taboo that could have
brought shame to the religiously oriented Mehari family. Asmerom
Gebreselassie also suspected that the Meharis wanted to obtain his brother's
$500,000 life insurance policy.
"People have been misled because the truth has been hidden from them. I
would like them to know the truth entirely," Asmerom Gebreselassie testified
in court. "They killed Abraham to hide the homosexuality and they tried to
kill me to hide the homosexuality. I didn't commit a crime, I have nothing
to hide."
Search for clues
In summer 2006, the taxi driver became increasingly preoccupied with proving
what he believed was the Meharis' web of deceit, raising allegations of
murder, a gay conspiracy and child molestation that he threatened to take
public.
Asmerom Gebreselassie took his suspicions to the police, to the life
insurance company and church leaders. Police and the life insurance company
investigated but found no evidence of murder, and the church rebuffed him.
Still, to prove one Mehari brother's supposed homosexuality, he created a
fake online persona to exchange emails with him, then confronted the Mehari
brother with the trail of correspondence inside the Temescal branch library
in early November 2006, just weeks before the fatal shooting. A loud
argument ensued before a librarian kicked them out.
One group of people did become convinced of what Asmerom Gebreselassie was
trying to prove: his own family. His brothers frequently joined him when the
elder Gebreselassie sought meetings with Eritrean community leaders and the
Mehari family itself.
"There were too many suspicions, it was not a matter of accepting (Abraham's
death) or not," Tewodros Gebreselassie testified.
In her computer diary, Winta Mehari wrote an anguished passage about the
conflict.
"It is not fair what the whole family is doing to me, I never did anything
to them," she wrote of the Gebreselassies, according to a court document.
"But God, let the lord of truth judge me."
The dispute came to a head on Thanksgiving afternoon, when her mother, Regbe
Bahrengasi, was hosting a holiday meal with family members in her cramped
unit in the sprawling Keller Plaza apartment complex.
Visitors were common, because the matriarchs of the Mehari and Gebreselassie
families lived in the same complex, so the arrival of Tewodros Gebreselassie
on a holiday did not come as a surprise. But when Asmerom Gebreselassie
showed up a short time later, gunfire broke out.
Presented with months' worth of testimony and evidence, a jury must now
decide who it believes.
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