The Abdirahman Abdi inquest is being livestreamed during the day here. (Tuesday’s hearing begins at 2 p.m.)
A friend of Abdirahman Abdi who witnessed and filmed the aftermath of his violent altercation with police has offered her account of the difficult hours and days following his death in 2016.
Nimao Ali testified Monday on Day 6 of the ongoing inquest into Abdi’s death. Abdi was a 38-year-old Somali-Canadian who struggled with mental illness and died a day after his encounter with police.
The inquest has so far has focused on the lead-up to the altercation and the details of the struggle itself.
But now the non-legal fact-finding mission is turning its attention to the aftermath, including Abdi’s time in hospital and the toll his death took on Ali as a fellow member of Ottawa’s Somali community.
A shocked Ali began filming the scene of a handcuffed Abdi from her fourth-floor balcony, capturing the period before and after paramedics arrived. Ali’s five-year-old son and her teen daughter watched by her side.
The video, described by the inquest’s presiding officer as “harrowing,” shows Abdi initially on his stomach with Const. Daniel Montsion crouching by his side.
A woman, now identified as Abdi’s mother, wails off-camera. She was watching the “lifeless” Abdi from the building’s vestibule along with other members of Abdi’s family, Ali said.
Once paramedics arrived, Montsion can be seen giving Abdi CPR, as he told the inquest he was instructed to do.
Before then, he’d regularly looked to see that Abdi, who had lost consciousness, was still breathing, until about a minute before paramedics came. By then, Montsion said, the chaotic scene around them had grown distracting.
Weir had earlier applied a pressure bandage to Abdi, which can also be seen in the video.
“And that is providing some assistance to Mr. Abdi?” asked a lawyer for Montsion and Weir.
“Some assistance, yes,” Ali replied.
The two officers also moved Abdi into the “recovery position” and asked that the call to paramedics be upgraded to priority status.
The question of whether CPR could have been started earlier has hovered over the inquest, as the management of Abdi once he was apprehended is one of the key issues being unpacked during the four-week inquest.
“[From] my medical training, even limited as it is, there is nothing that I can do when somebody loses consciousness other than put them in the recovery position and call the paramedics,” Montsion testified last week.
When questioned by a lawyer for the Abdi family, Montsion conceded that CPR can also be given.
On Monday, the ER doctor in charge of Abdi’s care was asked if CPR helps improve a person’s medical outcome if it’s given “sooner.”
“One-hundred per cent,” the doctor replied.
Making a copy of the video
Ali lived in Abdi’s building and had known him for seven years as a quiet but polite man. She’d known one of his sisters for even longer.
The building was home to many immigrant families, several of them from Somalia, including some of Abdi’s relatives.
To Ali, the two officers crouched by Abdi’s body “were just sitting around and I was a bit disheartened and really disappointed that there was no help provided,” she told the inquest.
She started filming because couldn’t believe her eyes, she said. Later, she became nervous she was “in trouble” when she learned police wanted to see her about the video.
“Somebody just died or somebody is brutally hurt and that’s supposed to be the officer’s number one concern. Why would somebody come to chase [me] down?”
She gave the video over to police, but not before making a copy.
Asked by the Abdi family lawyers if that was because she did not trust police, Ali said it was out of fear: “Fear of how the officer zoomed in that I recorded the video. [That] I live on the fourth floor. And they went upstairs to speak to my children.”
She had to provide the video, she added, “but at the same time, I need[ed] to make a copy or a backup just in case I never see that video again.”
Arguing for family’s need for prayer
In the early days of the Abdi story, Ali served as a spokesperson and interpreter for his family, like when she publicly announced his death on July 25, 2016.
She also had to press police to allow the family to say a Muslim prayer for Abdi in his hospital room, she told the inquest on Monday.
“They said no,” she said of police. “So I kept translating and arguing with them.”
Police cited the ongoing investigation into the arrest by the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), but Ali argued the prayer was “important. Time is of the essence.”
A person Ali believes was a health professional intervened to support Ali’s position and “we finally were allowed to go,” though police remained in the room, she said.
Ali said she would support a jury recommendation that would balance a family’s need to sit at a loved one’s bedside during an SIU investigation, and ensure such visits would not interfere with a criminal investigation.
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A call for more sensitivity
The relationship between the Ottawa Police Service and local Somalis, who felt over-policed and racially profiled, was already frayed when Abdi died. His death only made it worse, Ali testified.
In saying so, Ali drew from her own personal experience, noting that when her car was broken into, she was too scared to report it to police. As a witness in the Abdi case, she also wanted to remain “neutral.”
“In my faith, when you see something, regardless of who the perpetrators are and who the victim is, you have to tell the truth of exactly what you saw without taking sides,” she said.
Ali recommended more community-centric policing and cultural sensitivity training.
She also called for more understanding within her own community, saying mental illness is sadly seen as taboo.
“People don’t get diagnosed in the right time,” she said. “And once they finally do and they have the right medication or the right doctor, there’s no support or understanding or conversation in the community.”