Columbus woman's life forever changed by shooting at West Side apartment building
The screams haunt Kassim Omar.
She can still hear the shrill voices yelling, "Kassim died! Kassim died!"
Omar had just taken a seat on a stoop outside the apartment building on Columbus' West Side where she was living when she heard a gunshot, then another right before everything went black.
"'I'm going to die. I'm not going to make it,'" the then 27-year-old remembers thinking after realizing she had been struck by a bullet. "I could hear everybody, but I couldn't open my eyes."
As her neighbors yelled in panic and dialed 911, their frantic screams for help and sobs of horror made their words unintelligible at times to 911 dispatchers.
Omar tried but couldn't move. She couldn't see, then she couldn't hear either as she lost consciousness.
When she woke up several hours later, her life had forever changed.
Kassim Omar's life now, and her hopes for the future
Two years after the shooting on June 23, 2022, Omar lies in bed at a nursing home on Columbus' Far East Side, across the city from where the bullet pierced her neck, paralyzing her from her neck down. She hovers between her old life and an unknown next chapter, in what she said feels like a sort of limbo.
She is waiting on her relatives, who are living in a refugee camp in Kenya, hoping that they are able to join her in Columbus so she can move into the community and live in a home with them.
When two boys also living at the Wedgewood Village Apartments shot her that early June morning, Omar said it was just one incident in a long line of discrimination and hate she has faced throughout her life.
Omar, 29, is a transgender woman and a former refugee born in 1995 in Kismayo, Somalia. She said she knew she was gay from a young age and so did many others in her home country, where LGBTQ+ people are often raped, beaten, and sometimes even killed because of their sexual orientation and gender identity.
People knew she was gay because "the way I talk, the way I move," Omar said. "They say, 'You're gay, you're gay' and then I'd never deny it. I'd say 'Yes.'"
Omar said the discrimination started when she was just nine or 10 years old. She fled Somalia for Kenya, alone, settling in a refugee camp there with more than 255,000 other people displaced by civil wars.
As a teen, Omar said she was cut with knives, sexually assaulted and burned by others in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya due to her sexual orientation.
The United Nations expedited her resettlement case to the United States, and she arrived in Houston in 2015, but she said the discrimination didn't stop.
She moved to Columbus from Texas that same year and lived at the Wedgewood Village Apartments for four years before moving to the North Side in 2019.
In 2017, Omar met Lara Downing, a social worker and victim's advocate at Community Refugee and Immigration Services (CRIS), after she was raped. Downing, who has since become a friend, helped Omar come up with a safety plan and has been working with her ever since.
Omar was convicted of assault in 2018 after an incident at a local store during which she punched and hit the owner, who she told police made anti-gay slurs. Omar pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 180 days in jail.
In 2022, she moved back to Wedgewood Apartments to stay with friends and family, but it wasn't long before she said kids started harassing her because of her gender identity.
"When I came to Columbus, I thought my life was going to change," she said.
'I never thought they were going to shoot me'
Omar said she hoped to leave the violence and discrimination she faced behind her and embrace who she was. But she said she was often harassed while just living her life in Columbus.
She mostly ignored those who taunted and harassed her, she said. The week before she was shot, however, Omar said a then-12-year-old boy who lived in her complex whom The Dispatch is not naming because of his age, threatened her with a gun, calling her a racial slur and gay, saying he didn't like her.
Omar recalled him saying: "'I will shoot you now. I will do this. You're nothing. What are you going to do? I will shoot you in the face.'"
Omar said the boy had been harassing her for weeks, calling her anti-gay slurs and telling her he hated her, and she should leave. She said she called the police several times when the boy harassed her. But he didn't stop.
Omar believes the two boys involved in her shooting — the 12-year-old and then-16-year-old Ali Abdullahi — targeted her as part of a hate crime, because they didn't approve of her sexuality and gender identity and expression.
The 12-year-old boy told police that Abdullahi shot Omar because of the "'gay stuff,'" according to police documents.
"I was just sitting down. They came behind my back," Omar said of being shot. "I knew they were in the building, but I never thought they were going to shoot me."
Omar hoped to tell her story
Omar is now mostly confined to a bed, her life forever changed by the bullet, in what she describes as a jail of sorts. Meanwhile, she said, those who shot her were detained for much shorter time periods, or no time at all.
In the two weeks following the shooting, Columbus police detectives interviewed three first responders, four witnesses and two suspects. They also executed search warrants on apartments and cellphones, looking for evidence.
Days after the shooting, Abdullahi and the 12-year-old boy were arrested and charged with felonious assault, according to the case file from the Columbus Division of Police's investigation into the shooting.
Abdullahi was tried as an adult in Franklin County Common Pleas Court. He pleaded guilty to felonious assault with a gun specification and was sentenced to seven years in prison in February 2023, according to the court records.
Because of his age, the then-12-year-old boy underwent proceedings to determine if he was competent to stand trial. A Franklin County juvenile judge ruled him incompetent but Chris Clark, chief juvenile prosecutor in the Franklin County Prosecutor's office, said he hopes to try the boy, who is now 14, again when he's older.
Expert: Victims deserve to be interviewed by police
As the police investigation and court proceedings unfolded, Omar was at OhioHealth Grant Medical Center, Downtown, where she was treated for several days. She was then transferred to a nursing home in Heath, and months later, to one in Dublin. She eventually moved in August 2023 to the one where she is now on the Far East Side.
The Columbus police case file on Omar's shooting is 338-pages long, but she said she was never interviewed by police or prosecutors and the file does not include an interview with her.
A few hours after the shooting, a detective went to the hospital to try to interview her, but she was unconscious, according to the police file.
The police records show that the lead detective in the case contacted the nurse caring for Omar at Grant on June 28, 2022 and was told Omar was awake and could answer yes or no questions. But there's nothing indicating why detectives did not go interview her at that time.
The Columbus Division of Police declined to make anyone involved in the investigation available to talk to The Dispatch.
When asked why detectives didn't interview Omar during the case investigation, police spokesman Sgt. James Fuqua responded via email that Omar was "unable to speak due to the severity of the injuries (Omar) sustained in the shooting."
But police officers must keep trying, said David Sarni, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, who was surprised Omar was never interviewed by police during the investigation.
“No matter what you do, there has to be an interview with a victim,” said Sarni, who was a New York City Police Department detective for 27 years. “It’s kind of 'Investigations 101'.”
During his time as a detective, Sarni said he had victims who were intubated or couldn’t speak at first, like Omar. He said in those cases, he went back again and again, speaking continuously with hospital employees to see when the person could talk.
“There should have been continuous follow-up on the victim,” he said. “It’s a huge drop in an investigation."
Sarni said police officers are advocates for victims — who should be the first and last people they interact with on cases.
Fuqua said the prosecuting attorney said it wasn't necessary to interview Omar directly.
Clark said Omar wasn't interviewed or included in court proceedings because he couldn't find her. He wasn't able to get an answer from anyone as to where she was released to from Grant, he said.
"Nobody came to me, nobody asked me," Omar said. "... I want to tell them how they shot me. It was wrong, but nobody asked me anything."
Omar said she is angry that one of the suspects in her case is only in prison for seven years and the other has been free since he was found incompetent to stand trial at least for now, while she will be paralyzed the rest of her life. It outrages her, she said, that both boys were interviewed by law enforcement while she never was, denying her a chance for full justice.
"They're going to come out," she said, of Abdullahi and the younger boy. "... (But) the rest of my life, I'm going to be like this."
'Nobody deserves this ... I don't deserve this'
Despite being paralyzed, Omar carries on.
Her daily life is punctuated by listening to her favorite rappers — Kid Cudi, Young Dolph and Rod Wave.
She talks animatedly to her parents and seven siblings, who live in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. They chat via video call about their lives, how much they miss one another and what it will be like when they can join her in America.
Their talks make Omar beam and laugh. She wants to teach her mom English when she is finally able to move here, and Downing and CRIS are working to expedite Omar's family case so they can come care for her.
Above all, though, Omar waits.
Omar applied to have her parents and siblings join her in the United States in 2017. Their case is still pending, going through the myriad forms, interviews, tests and other factors that make up the U.S. refugee resettlement process, but she keeps hoping for them to join her soon.
Before being shot, Omar said her life in Columbus involved music and dancing.
She wanted to get training as a singer, and had performed dances at local Somali weddings, her hips gyrating to the fast beat. On YouTube there are videos of her singing and dancing.
"I miss (the life I had) before I got shot," Omar said from her room on a recent afternoon. "I used to get dressed up. I used to go to the club. I used to have fun. I miss that. Driving around, getting food. I miss all that. Life is so short."
Now, Omar said, "I'm just somebody paralyzed, sleeping on a bed."
Omar said she wants others to know what happened to her because she believes the way she was treated because of her gender identity is wrong.
"Nobody deserves this," she said. "I don't deserve this."
@DanaeKing
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Kassim Omar was shot at Wedgewood Village Apartments. Here's her story
