Yearlong inquiry by gang task force led to indictments
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
It was 4:30 in the morning when Daniel Ambaw found himself in a seedy Aurora Avenue motel room, about to disappoint his parents again.
His parents had fled civil war in Ethiopia for Sudan, trekking barefoot through mountains, past bodies stricken by thirst, disease and lions. In Sudan, they fled again, from crushing poverty for a golden chance in America.
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 | Paul Joseph Brown / P-I | |
| Belainesh Zelelew prays and weeps at Saint Gebriel Church of Ethiopians for her son, Daniel Ambaw, who faces a prison sentence for a drug offense. | ||
They had hoped Ambaw, their quiet middle son, might grow up to be a doctor or lawyer. He had excelled in math and was considered the smartest of their five children.
But by the summer of 2004, Ambaw had become a suspected big-time “crack” cocaine dealer. Detectives believed he ran with the “East African Posse,” a violent Seattle street gang.
On Jan. 4, 2005, police arrested Ambaw, then 22, at the Thunderbird Motel, after he allegedly pistol-whipped a man and burned the man’s hands with a lighter during a drug-related robbery. It was a harbinger of his current fate, which would come a year later.
In February, police announced that Ambaw and 15 others had been federally indicted on drug crimes. The announcement was made with great fanfare by law enforcement officials, but it deeply troubled the city’s burgeoning East African communities.
Most of those jailed were naturalized Ethiopians or Eritreans. Two were Somali. Three had Western surnames, including the only woman in the group. Most were young, in their late teens or early 20s.
“All this trouble we went through, for a better life for our kids. There’s no result if these kids spend their life in prison,” said Ambaw’s mother, Belainesh Zelelew, as she wept.
Her pain resonated with thousands of other people who trace their roots to the Horn of Africa. Many recognized the struggle of raising children in a foreign land. Others knew the heartbreak of watching a younger generation fail, despite enormous parental sacrifice.
Shortly after the announcement, more than 40 people crowded into a monthly East African communities meeting with the Seattle Police Department. They demanded answers. Normally, the meetings attract about four people.
“There’s sadness in the community,” Ezra Teshome, an insurance agent and Ethiopian community leader, said later. “The families are in pain; it is such a tremendous loss for them to lose their kids.
“They have crossed deserts; they came here with so much exertion. Now their dream is vanished for their children.”
Like Bloods and Crips
Most of the defendants, who now number 19, were indicted following a yearlong investigation by a gang task force that includes Seattle police and agents from the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
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| Paul Joseph Brown / P-I | |
| Ethiopians, including organizer Desse Tadess — wearing the colors of the Ethiopian flag — gather to discuss a new community center. | ||
Police say the gang was heavily armed and sold large quantities of crack, mostly in the University District. Prosecutors say the investigation netted more than $100,000 in cash, 10 guns, more than a kilo of powder cocaine, and hundreds of grams of crack. The street value of the drugs was $100,000.
Twelve of the defendants — with street names such as “Off One,” “K” and “Jimmy Velvet” — have pleaded guilty to drug-dealing charges, the latest coming last week. Sentencing agreements in the cases range from five to 10 years in prison.
“They try to be like the Bloods and the Crips,” said Sgt. Jim Dyment, who works out of the North Precinct, which includes the U District. “They see that and say, ‘That’s the lifestyle we want.’ Especially if you don’t have any money, and you see some guy with hundred-dollar bills, it’s very enticing for them.”
By last summer, the gang had become an intimidating fixture on University Way Northeast, where members brazenly sold dope and threatened merchants who dared to report them.
The group includes chronic runaways, high school dropouts, drug addicts and youths with long rap sheets. But most have one thing in common: Their families had wanted a new and improved life.
“It’s a proud, productive, law-abiding group of people that have emigrated to America,” North Precinct Lt. Dick Reed said of the city’s East African population. “These (gang) kids are simply a very, very small segment of that community.”
But the arrests were the latest in a series of troubling incidents involving young East Africans, beginning with a still-unsolved, gang-related killing of a 21-year-old Eritrean man last May.
Then came a fatal accident in November, in which a 21-year-old Ethiopian man died after the driver of the car he was in crashed while trying to elude police. Two years ago, Dyment and another officer spoke at an Ethiopian church to help parents better understand their kids.
“They say, ‘What do I do? How do I control him? I’ve tried everything,'” Dyment recalled. He told them what he’d tell any parent: Find out who their friends are.
It was a tall order.
Culture shock for refugees
Refugee advocates say the downhill slide of some East African youths here parallels the experience of some Cambodian and Vietnamese youths 10 to 15 years ago.
“It’s a huge jump in culture to come from these poor countries. And then you combine the fact that many of the elders and the parents have experienced torture and persecution … and they’re expected to raise their children into adolescence. It’s really difficult to do that,” said Jay Stansell, a federal public defender who has worked with refugees.
Most Ethiopians and Eritreans began arriving in Seattle in the 1980s, with the biggest wave of Ethiopians coming between 1989 and 1993. Somalis began coming here in the late 1990s. Community leaders estimate the population of Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis in the Puget Sound region at 30,000 to 40,000.
Many settled in public housing developments in poor neighborhoods, such as High Point and Yesler Terrace. Problems begin when kids learn English faster than their parents, setting up a difficult role reversal, social workers say.
Parents often either can’t find work, or work long, grueling hours, making them unavailable to their kids, advocates say. Others may suffer from depression from being displaced, or post-traumatic stress from hardships endured in their native countries.
Some of the children grew up with no formal schooling or have parents barely literate in their own language. When they struggle, parents often find school bureaucracies bewildering, with few interpreters to help them.
Many parents are also frustrated that the discipline they would have used in their native country — particularly the use of physical punishment — is unacceptable in America.
‘I feel empty now’
In Africa, children are often raised by a mix of parents, extended family and the neighborhood. But in America, parents are isolated and sometimes distrust government agencies that may help them.
One of the youngest Posse defendants is Yohannes Ambachew, a 19-year-old Ethiopian national who joined his father in America at age 8 after his mother abandoned him, according to court documents.
He endured language and cultural difficulties and a growing estrangement from his father, and dropped out of school. He began running away from home at 15 and lived in youth shelters.
Several times, Child Protective Services workers intervened at the family’s dark, ground-floor apartment in Madrona. Workers tried to offer counseling and considered consulting the family’s pastor, CPS records show.
But Ambachew’s father, Negassi Ayele, didn’t view the offers as help. Instead, he blamed the government for interfering and casting his son to the streets.
“They give him a caseworker and shelter, and say he is free to leave,” said Ayele, a 43-year-old packager at a newspaper production plant. “The government supported him to walk away. When he’s 15 years old, how is he going to live his life? Doing something bad: Steal, sell drugs to support himself.”
In November, Ambachew pleaded guilty to one count of dealing crack, after prosecutors accused him of tossing 107 grams of the drug out a car window. Next month, he is scheduled to be sent to prison for 10 years.
“They cut him from the family,” Ayele said. “I feel like I’m empty now, because I lost my child. I forgive him for what he did, but I lost him. I feel like I lost him forever.”
Neighborhood on the brink
Until he went to jail last year, Ambaw lived with his parents on Yesler Way in the Central District, in a drab, fortress-like, federally subsidized building.
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| Paul Joseph Brown / P-I | |
| Assaye Abunie, an energetic computer consultant, teaches computers, Ethiopian culture and Amharic to Ethiopian children at the Rainier Vista housing development. | ||
Their tidy apartment radiates with reminders of home: family portraits, Ethiopian drums, injera bread in the kitchen, and an abundance of crosses reflecting the parents’ Ethiopian Orthodox Christian faith.
The building overlooks a heavily barred convenience store and a strip of vacant, padlocked businesses. One morning, Ambaw was robbed at knifepoint by three men, just outside the complex’s imposing metal front gate.
Despite the grim neighborhood, it was a step up from Khartoum, the Sudanese capital where Ambaw was born. His father had been a grain farmer in Ethiopia and worked as a cook and housecleaner for a wealthy family. It gave him a glimpse at how his kids might live if they came to America. The family arrived in 1993 when Ambaw was 10.
But at school — at Stevens Elementary and later at Nathan Hale High School — kids often teased Ambaw, said his father. They joked that he bought his clothes at Goodwill. “He always ask, ‘Can I have another clothing?’ ” said Ambaw’s father, Melede Lakew.
Ambaw dropped out of school after his junior year. “We tried our best to give our love to him. I don’t know what happened to him to go to this direction,” Lakew said.
Ambaw’s older brother, Samuel, had an answer: the neighborhood.
“It’s not like we were living in Bellevue or Mercer Island. You live around so much negativity; it’s really hard to avoid that every single day,” said Samuel Ambaw, 26.
Like his brother, he spent his youth playing basketball at the nearest Boys & Girls Club. Painfully isolated in their early days, they watched TV to learn English quickly.
Unlike his brother, he escaped the “hole,” as he calls the neighborhood, by graduating from high school. He has started his own business, a chauffeur service with Mercedes-Benzes, with a friend.
Daniel Ambaw, who went by the street name “D,” declined requests to be interviewed. He recently pleaded guilty to one count of dealing crack, agreeing to an eight- to nine-year prison term. Sentencing is slated for June.
Every Saturday, his mother tries to visit him at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, but he told her to stop coming, if all she was going to do was cry. An affectionate woman with faded tattooed crosses on her face, Zelelew often consoles herself at church.
On a recent Sunday, more than 300 people packed the colorful Saint Gebriel Church of Ethiopians, where Zelelew attends, for a nearly five-hour service. Women in white head veils sat on the right and men sat on the left. In between wailing babies and fidgeting toddlers, there was communion, two choirs and a Bible lesson.
Sprinkled in the Central District crowd were many youths such as 21-year-old Kalekidan Eshete, who walks a tightrope between two worlds. After the service, she removed her purple-and-white choir robe and joined the social hour of coffee, injera and spicy meat.
Smart and bubbly, Eshete attends Seattle Central Community College and represents the many success stories of her culture. But she understands the struggle of newcomers.
“That’s one of the problems. You don’t understand the culture. You try to fit in, but you don’t want to lose your own culture. It’s hard to balance,” said Eshete, who came to America when she was 14.
She had been lonely at school because she didn’t speak English and frustrated with her parents, who were strict and unfazed by American culture. Her mother had insisted on accompanying her and her siblings to the mall. They couldn’t go to the movies by themselves.
“The one thing that helped me is coming to church,” she said, adding that she now cherishes her parents’ values in religion and education. “I think I have done well trying to balance my church life and my American friends.”
‘We lost this generation’
While many elders turn to church for help, Tito Wolde, a board member at the Ethiopian Community Mutual Association, says the community needs more support from schools and police.
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| Paul Joseph Brown / P-I | |
| Teshome Beyene drills an Ethiopian coed youth soccer team at Ingraham High School. “I’m trying to keep them off drugs,” said Beyene. | ||
“We lost this generation,” he said, describing some of the people who came here as children and are now in jail, unemployed or underemployed. “Now we are looking for the next generation. How (can) we save the little kids?”
There is a lot of interest in the subject in the Ethiopian community. Last Sunday, hundreds met to discuss the need for a new community center.
Every Saturday afternoon, there’s a practice for an Ethiopian youth soccer league, which includes 45 kids. And every Saturday morning, Assaye Abunie teaches a class on Amharic, Ethiopian culture and computers.
“These kids, being the first generation (to be born in America), they don’t know who they are,” said Abunie, an energetic 45-year-old computer consultant. “They are in-between. We have a responsibility to teach them who they are, where they come from.”
On a recent rainy morning, Abunie lectured 10 students about Ethiopia’s independence from Italy in 1896. He taught a few phrases in Amharic, including “Sit down” and “Be our guest.”
“This is your homework for next week! Read, read, read it, OK?” Abunie said, waving a sheet of phrases. “Make a conversation with your parents, OK? You guys, are you listening?”
It seemed like a losing battle. An 11-year-old boy in the back was watching a D4L rap video. An 8-year-old boy played a gun-slinging computer game, while two teenage girls listened to Mariah Carey on headphones.
But the class wound up making progress on a computer-graphic project. A 12-year-old girl created a piece of art that blended old with new: a photo of a classmate’s face, created with the latest technology, painted with green, yellow and red.
The colors of the Ethiopian flag.
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