A cold December morning in 2007 brought two fatal shootings in Minneapolis. Twenty-seven-year-old Arie Musse Jama, a Black man from St. Paul, was found in an alley with gunshot wounds to the chest and neck. Nearby, in the hallway of a south Minneapolis apartment building at 3127 Pleasant Avenue, 25-year-old Najib A. Omar had been shot in the head.

Police said the killings appeared connected and not random, and that an argument inside the apartment building may have precipitated the violence. Community narratives within the local Somali population circulated that Omar might have been the primary target of a dispute with another man and that Jama, a distant relative and friend, was killed to remove a witness. No suspects were publicly identified and no arrests or charges have been announced, leaving the case unsolved.

Did anyone in the community witness the argument or the movements of either man that morning?