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The third of four defendants from a Feb. 15 New Marshfield shootout was convicted of murder and aggravated robbery late Thursday.
Like two previous defendants convicted in connection with the incident, 17-year-old Abdifatah Abdi was sentenced to 28 years to life in prison for a gunfight in which a 39-year-old Meigs County man died. (During Abdi's trial, his attorneys presented testimony suggesting he is actually 16.)
After hearing final arguments in the case Wednesday, Athens County Common Pleas Judge Michael Ward sent the jury home, and had them reconvene Thursday morning. After hearing instructions, the jury went into deliberations about 10 a.m.
It wasn’t until some nine hours later that they reached a verdict, and when they returned to the courtroom, it appeared that some of them had been crying.
Abdi’s mother, who was in the courtroom, burst into wild lamentations upon hearing the verdict, crying out, “It’s not fair! My son never killed nobody! Oh my God!”
Abdi, too, insisted on his innocence, telling Sharon Tucker, mother of the slain man Donnie Putnam, that he is sorry for her son’s death, but didn’t cause it. He said that during the shootout in which Putnam was killed, the fatal shot came from inside a trailer from which people were shooting out, not from from the outside where he and the other defendants were.
“Everyone sitting here knows, those shots did come out of the house,” he declared. “If you want to blame anybody (for Putnam’s death), blame those people in the house that were wired up on crack.” (There was testimony from witnesses who were inside the trailer that they had smoked crack cocaine before the incident.)
Abdi and three others were arrested for having come to the New Marshfield home of Billy Osborne, Jr., shortly after midnight, packing guns and planning to collect on a debt that Osborne supposedly owed to fellow New Marshfield resident Phillip Dionte Boler for cocaine.
A gunfight broke out, and when Putnam arrived on scene, planning to buy drugs, he was killed by a 9mm bullet in the crossfire.
Boler, 27, and Mohat Osman, 17, of Columbus, had already been convicted and sentenced to 28 to life when Abdi went on trial.
This leaves one more defendant, a woman, 21-year-old Hamda Jama, who like the others is facing counts of murder and aggravated robbery. The murder charge is one of so-called “felony murder,” which doesn’t require that any of the defendants actually pulled the trigger on the gun that killed Putnam. It is enough, legally, that they initiated a felony in which Putnam died.
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Yeah, I know, they were just peacefully going-about-their-business of getting high on crack. We can't have some black kids just rolling into New Marshfield, actin' like they own the place and trying to help their friend get his money.
Why don't we look at those people inside the house and see how virtuous their lives are? What about their families, who probably don't have enough to eat because they're blowing the bread money on rock? What about their poor kids, who(if they're lucky) were already in foster care? I guarantee you some innocent person was waiting at home for each one of those deadbeats to run out of money and come home. YEAH, I'm making generalizations, but in my experience CRACKHEADS are irresponsible, selfish people who don't have the basic humanity to care about anyone else. And now a kid's going to prison for them?
Yeah, he's guilty too, but it doesn't seem like he committed murder. This is an outrage.