By Kathryn Skelton,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Ahmed Hussein Samater moved to Lewiston from Atlanta for a job. A big man, single, one family member said Samater had “alcohol issues.” He moved to Portland three months ago and started to clean up.

When he visited last weekend he looked good. Groomed. He paid back everyone who’d loaned a few bucks. Then, sometime Sunday afternoon, he started drinking.

Police found him at 6:25 shouting obscenities out a third floor apartment window, a hundred feet from the front door of the police station.

They warned him to stop.

He kept swearing. After 20 minutes, officers arrested him for disorderly conduct and violating bail conditions for having alcohol. Police tape from a camera aimed over the station’s parking lot shows two officers linking an arm around each of Samater’s elbows while the three walk toward a cruiser at 6:45 p.m.

Six hours later he was dead.

Samater’s death – in police custody, with a cause that’s unknown – has the usually quiet and close-knit Somali community clamoring for justice.

About 40 people paced back and forth between City Hall and the Police Department on Friday afternoon complaining about police brutality and not being listened to.

Isha Mahamud of Lewiston led a chant of “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!”

She said people feel they don’t have enough facts to weigh Samater’s death for themselves. And it comes on top of feeling discouraged that more everyday complaints – objects being tossed at Somali women or families’ cars broken into – aren’t investigated.

Samater was a student of her father’s when he was in Somalia.

“We’re given no answers. We need to know what happened,” Mahamud said. “This is a true injustice done for the Somali community.”

Mohdi Ali said he was Samater’s second cousin. He just moved to Lewiston himself.

“To be honest, we are very suspicious of what happened inside the Androscoggin County Jail. We need a fair, impartial and independent investigation,” said Ali. “If it’s true he died of natural causes, fine. The silence after gave us suspicion.”

Somalis started moving to relatively rural Lewiston from big, southern cities by the hundreds around the year 2000. Many have come from Atlanta, attracted by the schools and low crime rate.

“To be honest with you, even though people are here, they’re afraid,” Ali added. “There is that feeling that something is not right, all the time. It’s sad.”

Samater was found in his cell Sunday night at the Androscoggin County Jail having difficulty breathing. Help was called. A hospital pronounced the 46-year-old dead a short while later.

Police Chief William Welch said he didn’t realize that his death would become an issue until one lieutenant took a call early this week from the Associated Press in Wisconsin. The conversation went along the lines of: “We understand you had a Somali in custody and beat him to death.”

Welch said an autopsy showed no signs of physical force. Results of toxicology tests will take months. State police are leading the investigation.

“I think there was something medically wrong with him,” Welch said. No one in the Somali community has contacted his officers asking to meet or asking for more information, he said.

Jim Spencer of Lewiston came down to watch the rally, which took place a day after Samater’s funeral.

There aren’t enough facts to condemn police, he said. “I think this thing is a big, big joke. If they don’t like it, Greyhound’s just down the street.”

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