Sexual assault case raises race issues

RANGELEY – When he led this resort town’s overwhelmingly white high school to a conference soccer championship last year, Abdalahi Shakur Abdi appeared to be living the American dream.

That dream became a nightmare of multiple rape charges a year later, culminating in the teenage Somali refugee’s guilty plea to a lesser felony count of unlawful sexual contact and five months in jail.

His case raised questions about how an isolated community reacts to issues involving race, sex and crime. It left residents divided as to whether Abdi brought the nightmare on himself or was the naive victim of a teenage girl seeking vengeance against the boyfriend who left her.

Andrew Robinson, the Franklin County prosecutor, said the case was the most bizarre he has ever handled.

“You charge him with rape, and it’s, ‘Let’s make him mayor,”‘ Robinson told the Boston Globe. “I’d never heard that.”

Abdi’s soccer coach said the allegations that Abdi raped his white live-in girlfriend throughout the summer of 2002 were astounding.

“Nobody could believe it,” said the coach, Tom Danforth.

Abdi drew support from the high school’s 2003 senior class, which broke into prolonged applause when his photograph was shown in a video presentation during graduation ceremonies. Abdi was behind bars at the time as his friends tried unsuccessfully to raise $5,000 bail.

Robinson said Abdi’s teenage accuser was vindicated when Abdi pleaded guilty to the reduced charge, which requires that he register as a sexual offender for the rest of his life.

Abdi said he accepted the plea bargain because of his lawyer’s pessimistic view of the case and the probability of deportation if convicted of three counts of rape. Abdi was sentenced in September to time served in jail and two years probation.

Efforts to contact his former girlfriend and her family were unsuccessful.

Abdi said the unspoken force of post-Sept. 11, 2001, attitudes toward Muslims worked against him. “I feel like they judged me without getting to know me because of who I am, because of where I came from,” said Abdi, who had moved to Rangeley from the Somali refugee community in Lewiston.

Fred Jones, a Bangor social worker who advocated for Abdi, said the court-appointed defense counsel argued against fighting the rape charges at trial. Jones said the lawyer, Thomas Dean of Farmington, told him, in effect, that “we can’t win against a white girl in the state of Maine.”

Dean’s law office said the lawyer would not comment.

Robinson said he is amazed at the “blind support” for Abdi in what he called “a classic sexual assault case.”

“When you hear folks say we were railroading him, what we were doing was simply looking at the evidence,” Robinson said. “What do you do when you have a victim who tells you she’s been raped all summer long?”

The Rangeley teenager told police that Abdi had raped her 20 times in the spring and summer of 2002, that he struck her in the presence of witnesses, that he threatened her with a tire iron, and that he was verbally abusive.

A Rangeley teenage boy told authorities he saw Abdi shove the woman against a car door, scream that in Somalia he “would have killed her,” and order her to “get in the [expletive] house and cook him some damn food.”

Now 19, Abdi lives in a shabby one-room apartment in Bangor, clothes strewn about the floor. He has no job, nor the ready prospect of one.

“I don’t have a plan,” Abdi said. “It’s the same old, same old. I just basically get up in the morning and watch TV.”

Abdi said he now rarely mingles in public. “I feel like somebody will just accuse me of something again,” Abdi said.

But Robinson maintains that neither Abdi’s race nor religion played any role in the legal process.

“He has fared about 1,000 times better than many people who have been charged with gross sexual assault,” the prosecutor said.