Goodbye Good Samaritan

Are there any "Good Samaritans" left in this country?

In St. Paul, MN, as many as 10 people witnessed a man raping and beating a woman early Tuesday in the hallway of an apartment building, police said Wednesday.

NO ONE STOPPED IT.

The victim even attempted to knock on one of the doors, yelling for the occupants to call police. A man inside supposedly told police that he made the 911 call, but he didn't even open the door to check what was going on. However, police found no record of the call according to an affidavit. So basically, the man was just lying.

Police later arrested Rage Ibrahim on suspicion of criminal sexual conduct. He was later charged with two counts of rape: first-degree and third-degree criminal sexual conduct.

St. Paul Police Cmdr. Shari Grey oversees the department's sex crimes unit: "It was horrifying. I can't describe how it sent chills up my back, watching this woman get assaulted and people turning their backs and doing nothing."

Police have evidence of a video recording showing the attack.

Here's the sickening part. As the woman screamed, five to 10 people - men and women - peeked out their apartment doors to see what was happening or started walking down the hallway and retreated after witnessing the assault. You have to wonder if these neighbors knew each other, some of them could have got together and stopped the rape.

Police say someone did call 911, but reported it as drunken people in a hallway, not a violent assult, so police thought it was just a disturbance. Now if it was classified as an assault, the police response would have been quicker.

The first 911 call came at 2:43AM, police arrived at 3:25AM. That's 42 minutes.

This is reminiscent of the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder which has coined the term "Genovese syndrome" - or bystander effect. Genovese was stabbed to death outside a Queens apartment building while many people looked on from their windows but didn't step in to help. There were approximately 38 people that saw the murder. Only one person called police, but it was too late, Genovese was already dead.

Back to this...when police arrived on the scene, they found Ibrahim and a woman on the floor, both naked from the waist down.

Ibrahim told the officers they were just drunk and she was her girlfriend, but the woman told them he had drugged and raped her.

The surveillance video showed Ibrahim striking the woman five times including the sexual assault itself. This lasted for about 90 MINUTES!

Another shock to police was that Ibrahim told police that if he wanted to assault the woman, he would have done it in the apartment!

Also shown in the video, a man did approached the two people, but turned around. The building manager spoke with the person and asked why he did not call police. The man replied, "I thought they were drunk. And I left."

The woman suffered numerous scratches, cuts, and bruises on her legs, face, and shoulder.

Ibrahim stated he got scratched on the lip, arm, and "everywhere."

* * * * *

Even though there is evidence that Ibrahim has committed this awful crime, he has a defender. Omar Jamal, the Executive Director of the Somali Justice Center said that the assailant is innocent of the charges. It seems he is the "Al Sharpton" of the Somali community in St. Paul, playing both sides of any domestic violence cases there.

Jamal (who was not even at the scene of the crime, and is basing on Ibrahim's side of the story) stated that the accused went into the hallway after the woman because he thought she was too drunk to drive. They struggled over the car keys, and "he is saying there was a huge misunderstanding," he said, adding that the police report does not show "the truth of what happened that night."

"He did not rape her," Jamal said.

Given that most residents in the building were Somali, Jamal said that they tend to mistrust and fear the police. "The only system they know (from Somalia) is a military, totalitarian government that tortures and executes people," he said. "Their understanding is a system that oppresses and that kills. People have no rights. They are used to keeping quiet and not saying anything." Based on this, it would have influenced their behavior on whether to act or not.

This would depend if some of the residents have only been in the country for a short period of time, but I rather think it is more culture-effect than worrying about the government going after you.

The question I posed to Jamal is if the residents are unwilling to call the police, why they did not act to stop it themselves? Could it be that in a domestic violence situation for Somalis, the male is dominant? If they saw a man beating up a woman, they would probably assume she deserved it. Some advocates believe that such things are considered taboo for them, so they would want to keep it in-house instead of letting someone [law enforcement] from the outside intervene. He did say that women are strongly discouraged from reporting it.

So we need to change that.