At a candlelight vigil for Yonas Alehegne, an Ethiopian immigrant who was shot and killed by an Oakland police officer in August, in Oakland, Calif., on Sunday, September 13, 2015. (Photo: Sarah Rice/SF Chronicle)
By Rachel Swan
A man shot and killed by an Oakland police officer in August left behind only a small pile of luggage and a few family photographs, one of which had a phone number scrawled on the back.
The number belonged to the 30-year-old man’s mother, Genet Alemu, who sells injera bread to support a family of seven in Ethiopia. She last heard from her son, Yonas Alehegne, several months before his death.
CASE HISTORY
Police are seen at the scene of a police involved shooting at MacArthur Boulevard and Van Buren Avenue in Oakland, Ca. on Thursday, Aug. 27, 2015. The incident left the involved police officer in the hospital and the suspect dead at the scene. Man shot dead by Oakland cop had violent past. An officer was injured and a suspect was shot by police in Oakland on Thursday morning. Oakland cop shoots suspect dead after chain attack.
“I feel like I’m dead,” Alemu said from her village in Dire Dawa, where she lives in a house that her other son, Habtamu, describes as “almost a tent.” Alemu was reached by phone Sept. 12 — the day of the Ethiopian new year. Dawn had broken and a rooster crowed insistently in the background.
Remembering “Yonas,” Alemu wailed.
“He was my first son,” she said, speaking through an interpreter in Amharic, the language spoken in Ethiopia. “He came to the U.S. to help us.”
Whatever dreams and ambitions Alehegne had when he arrived in the United States in 2012 were soon replaced by distress and desperation.
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