The suicide of Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi, 22, on Saturday, while he was being held on multiple charges related to the shooting of a 39-year-old Orthodox Jewish man walking to synagogue on Shabbat, has opened more questions than answers for Jewish organizations in Chicago. He was found by the Cook County Sheriff’s Office staff “unresponsive due to an apparent suicide attempt by hanging in his cell.”
“I think most people don’t understand how the system works and instinctively think good riddance, a savage terrorist deserved to die, taxpayers save money and the threat self-neutralized,” Rabbi Shlomo Soroka, director of government affairs at Agudath Israel of Illinois, told JNS. “They’re not wrong, but there’s the big picture here.”
He added that “we will probably never find out if terrorism was a politically motivated, gratuitous charge or if the State’s Attorney was collaborating with the mayor’s office.”
Abdallahi faced 16 felony counts, including hate crime and terrorism.
Daniel Goldwin, chief public affairs officer for the Jewish Federation of Chicago, told JNS that “even though Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi is dead, we assume the investigation behind his crimes, including one count of terrorism, will not end.”
He said that “while we won’t have the immediate transparency of a criminal trial, we know that our law enforcement agencies, like their Israeli counterparts, will continue to look into important facets of the case, such as whether he had accomplices and whether he was radicalized and inspired to attack the Jewish community after he entered the United States.”
