LEWISTON — A four-door sedan, pumping loud music, pulled to the side of the road and briefly rocked back and forth before a young Black man was shoved out of the passenger side of the car.

The car then took off, tires screeching.

A young girl nearby screamed after seeing the man motionless on the ground. The muffled popping sounds had betrayed the gunshots that came from inside the car moments earlier.

The person lying dead on the ground was 17-year-old Sahal Muridi. The girl screaming was his sister.

“(He was) left dead in the road. I called 911 and broke down,” one Rideout Avenue resident told the Sun Journal about witnessing the July 14, 2024, shooting. “He was gone and there was nothing any of us could do.”

Lisbon Street shop owner Safia Hersi said she can remember the night Muridi was killed. She was driving into the neighborhood when the shots rang out. She learned later that the victim was someone whose family frequented her store.

“They hurt,” said Hersi, who owns Almadina at 266 Lisbon St. “They hurt a lot. I haven’t seen them for a while. I just feel so sorry for them.”

Where she lives, gunshots don’t happen all that often, Hersi said, but when they do there is no denying the fear that permeates the community. Over her 22 years in the city, 16 years as a business owner, shootings have become increasingly more common.

“Now, there’s gang violence and, I mean, one of my friends lost her son,” Hersi said. “Over two or three years it’s been very different.”

Muridi’s July 14 death outside his 77 Rideout Ave. home was among a spate of shootings that weekend and had Lewiston residents pushing hard for answers to the seemingly daily occurrence of loud bangs and pops.

Maine State Police and the Office of the Maine Attorney General have offered little information about Muridi’s shooting death. A Sun Journal request for two search warrants by Lewiston police was denied by a judge in October with the explanation that juveniles were involved in the warrants.

Lewiston Police Department data, formally requested by a police department employee in November on behalf of the Maine Coalition for Gun Safety, shows police have identified a 21-year-old suspect.

Gun violence, which police say persists specifically among youths, came into increased public view for downtown residents on Aug. 24 during a Family Fun Day back-to-school event at Michael McGraw Park. In the midst of the festivities attended by 300 children and their families, shots rang out close by.

Police said that day that a group of youths approached the nearby Masjidu Salaam Mosque on Bartlett Street and fired off shots in the air. The youths continued firing shots near Horton and Pine streets.

A gun violence and safety forum scheduled the next day, held by local organizations that were also hosting the back-to-school event, was canceled. Organizations like Lewiston Auburn Youth Network, Generation Noor and Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services have been holding such forums throughout 2024 due to increasing gun violence.

Despite closing out 2024 with slightly fewer shooting incidents than in the previous year, city residents continue clamoring for answers to a problem best understood, for those who don’t live it, by the data.

DATA REVEAL INCREASE IN SHOOTINGS

Lewiston police Chief David St. Pierre said in a Sept. 3 city hall workshop that the city has experienced a “recent uptick” in shootings. St. Pierre said LPD logged 42 confirmed shootings in 2022 and 45 in 2023, adding that data for previous years was not available.

Data later provided by LPD, though, reveal figures dating to 2010 and the results show an uptick starting in 2018.

Shootings from 2010-17 stayed mostly in the single digits. Then LPD reported 18 confirmed shootings in 2018, 12 in 2019, 13 in 2020 and 27 in 2021. They rose to 42 shootings in 2022, and, conflicting with St. Pierre’s earlier figure, dropped slightly to 38 in 2023.

According to LPD’s monthly statistics, the numbers add up to 35 confirmed shootings last year. Two were recorded for January 2025.

“Confirmed” shootings mean police were able to establish a crime scene with evidence of a shooting. This data does not include unconfirmed reports of shootings, suicide or accidental discharges.

Confirmed shootings can be extremely difficult to establish, St. Pierre said Tuesday. Rigorous investigation — including hours of combing areas where shootings are reported, reviewing hours of surveillance footage and hours of witness interviews — often yields no confirmations, St. Pierre said.

“We do get a lot of reports of shots fired that we can’t confirm. … Without shell casings or video, it’s tough to verify. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but sometimes there’s just no evidence left behind,” St. Pierre said.

“We want to be transparent with crime data, but there’s always going to be a gap between reported incidents and confirmed cases,” he added. “We’ve had cases where a shooting gets reported at one location, but when we investigate, we find out it actually happened somewhere else. That makes data tracking tricky.”

Lewiston City Councilor Joshua Nagine said St. Pierre initially advised him that shooting data has been officially tracked only over the past four years. A Freedom of Access Act request on the data and further questioning, however, revealed compilation of shooting data had been ongoing for many years, though not as rigorously as in recent years.

“I have since met with (public information officer) Lt. Derrick St. Laurent and the police crime data analyst, where they explained the sources of the data I was seeing on social media and being shared by the Maine Gun Safety Coalition,” Nagine said. “I am of the opinion that this information could have been released when it was asked for by council.”

Nagine said that though the earlier information may not be as complete, it is a “bellwether” to help determine if “community sentiment matches an actual increase in shooting incidents.”

“(It’s) a measuring stick to use when determining if our actions to address gun violence in Lewiston are actually effective,” Nagine said.

Based on available numbers, Nagine said he views gun violence as the city’s most pressing public safety concern.

LPD crime analyst Amy Blaisdell-Pechmanova said in an interview that she started tracking shooting data between 2014 and 2015 and drew data retroactively from previous years. She said the process for tracking data has changed over the years.

“For the first few years, I collected just the basic information — date, time, day, how many shots fired. Now it’s, it’s a massive spreadsheet,” Blaisdell-Pechmanova said, adding that new fields include information like whether a suspect has a concealed weapons permit, isn’t allowed to possess a firearm and any information in general that helps police with their investigations.

“In the last three to five years, there’s been a lot more tracking of things like, ‘was there property damage? Was there a gunshot wound?’ So, it’s always evolving,” she said.

Despite public perception that Lewiston grows more violent by the year, data show that while gun violence has increased, there has been a decrease in overall violent crime. Both have been gradual since at least 2010, according to several data sources.

The FBI crime data explorer shows that LPD reported around 600 violent crimes in 2012. The number waned, waxed and ultimately fell to 476 in 2023. The FBI categorizes violent crimes as murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. The FBI does not track reported shootings.

The FBI measures crime rates by dividing the number of reported crimes by the population of the area and multiplying by 100,000. The resulting number is how many crimes per 100,000 people. The crime rate in 2010 was nearly 32 compared to 2024’s crime rate of nearly 17. Crime rates in the years between were 40 in 2011; 41 in 2012; 36 in 2013; 27 in 2014; 23 in 2015; 22 in 2016; 24 in 2017; 19 in 2018; 22 in 2019; 21 in 2020; 19 in 2021; and 22 in 2022 and 2023.

Blaisdell-Pechmanova said it’s not unusual to see events like shootings rise while violent crimes and crime rates fall.

VIOLENCE AMONG YOUTH

Not only have shootings drastically increased over several years, but perpetrators of violent crimes are growing younger in age, a fact that both police testimony and data support. It’s one of the reasons why LPD and Lewiston School District plan on holding upcoming community meetings. The first meeting will be on Feb. 25 at 5:30 p.m. at Montello Elementary School and the second on Feb. 27 at 5:30 p.m. at Lewiston Middle School.

LPD data listed Muridi’s homicide as having a single 21-year-old suspect. Five days later, a second shooting at the Rideout Avenue address had a single 17-year-old suspect.

Numbers for 2023 and 2024 show that about 24% of identified suspects were under 18 and about 51% were ages 21 and younger.

Data from January 2010 to September 2024 show that 10% of all shooting incidents were under 18 and about a third of all suspects were 21 and younger.

The data also show that suspects since 2010 were as young as 13 years old — about 24% of identified suspects in 2023 and 2024 were younger than 18 and about 51% were ages 21 and under.

Up to September 2024, suspects in shooting incidents dating to January 2010 average in age around 26 years old. Minors were just under 10% of all shooting incidents and about a third of all suspects were 21 and under.

According to the FBI’s crime data explorer, Lewiston’s violent criminal offenders aged 10-19 nearly tripled between 2012 and 2022. Lewiston experienced a low of 11 criminal offenders in that age group in 2016, bumped up to 20 the following year, to 16 in 2018, 19 in 2019, 23 in 2020, 28 in 2021 and 30 in 2022.

“It’s not necessarily that it’s a widespread problem amongst the common teenager. … I can’t tell you that there’s dozens and dozens of people that are carrying guns illegally and shooting them off recklessly,” St. Pierre said. “If you have one kid, for instance, that’s out shooting a gun and he does it five or 10 times, that has a huge impact on our shooting incidents numbers.”

Police have also seen a significant decrease in cases in which suspects were identified. From 2010-17, of 47 total shootings, 41 — about 87% — had suspects attached to their respective investigations. Of 184 total shootings from 2018-24, exactly half, or 92, had identified suspects. Except for 2020, which yielded 84.6% of investigations identifying suspects, no year in that run had greater results than 2021 at 52%. The lowest rate of identified suspects — 16 out of 38 investigations, or 42% — came in 2023.

If no arrests are made at the scene of a reported shooting, the chances of the investigation narrowing in on a suspect can be slim, St. Pierre said. Reviewing hours of surveillance footage might identify the description of a vehicle or spot a potential perpetrator running from the general area of the shooting, but it often doesn’t provide conclusive identification.

“A lot of times, we have an idea who has done the shooting, but we just don’t have probable cause to make an arrest,” St. Pierre said. “And it’s incredibly frustrating when we get to a victim and we want nothing more than to help that person and they don’t want to talk to us or whatever — that puts us at a disadvantage.”

A NEIGHBORHOOD IN THE CROSSFIRE

Aside from one shooting in Dufresne Plaza in 2023 and another on Park Street near Kennedy Park in 2022, the downtown business district on Lisbon Street had no shootings from 2022-24. However, the city’s dense residential area in general is where a vast majority of shootings in the city have occurred.

Over 83% of shootings, or 95 of 114, from 2022 through 2024 occurred between Russell Street, the Androscoggin River and Mike McGraw Park. High crime areas include Pierce Street and Knox Street, which had 12 and nine shootings, respectively. There were also six each on Pine and Walnut streets, four each on Horton and Bartlett streets and three each on Blake and College streets.

Knox Street was the scene of a fatal shooting in 2023 that involved a Lewiston man ultimately involved in four known Maine shootings, including one that ended up killing him.

Mohamed Liban was 24 at the time and living in Lewiston when he shot and killed Mohamed Sheikh on Knox Street on July 30, 2023, after Sheikh shot and killed Liban’s friend, Keyt Hussein. Liban drove Hussein to Central Maine Medical Center where he died from his wounds.

Three weeks after the Knox Street shooting, Liban and a woman he was with were shot in Dufresne Plaza. The two sustained minor injuries from the single shot.

Five months later in January, Liban was shot and killed in Augusta by police after threatening Sand Hill neighborhood residents with a gun.

Liban had outstanding warrants in Ohio and Massachusetts and was charged with reckless conduct with a firearm related to a shooting and for being a fugitive from justice in a Webster Street shooting in Lewiston on the evening of Jan. 20, 2023.

While the Knox Street shooting occurred mid-morning, the retaliatory attack on Liban, like most shootings occurring in the neighborhood, happened after dark.

Muridi’s murder occurred in the evening and a month later, Sir Warrior Greene, 34, of Massachusetts allegedly shot a 46-year-old woman on Blake Street in the early morning of Aug. 16. Greene faces 50 years in prison.

The following evening, an Auburn man created a standoff with Lewiston police and took his own life. On the evening of Sept. 24, several buildings and at least one occupied car was struck by bullets on Pierce Street.

Most recently, Nathan Breton, 28, of Greene, was charged for a shooting incident outside an Ash Street bar on the night of Feb. 2. Breton shot Mahad Mohamed, 29, of Lewiston in the leg, a non-life-threatening injury that put him in the hospital.

The Gun Violence Archive Atlas is a map showing all U.S. shootings leading to injury or death since 2014. The map shows that just one shooting in Lewiston led to a single injury in 2014 and that none were reported in 2015. In 2016, three shootings caused injuries, in 2017, two, and in 2018, four. In 2019, six were injured and one killed in five shootings in Lewiston, in 2020 three were injured and two killed in five shootings, and in 2021 three were injured in three shootings.

Some 13 shootings in Lewiston in 2022 resulted in 10 injuries and three deaths. Not counting the Oct. 25, 2023, mass shooting, the Atlas showed four shooting incidents here in 2023 in which six were injured and two were killed.

Hersi, the shop owner, said that while the community understands the difficulties police have identifying shooting suspects, she hopes they can find a way to take action before more people get hurt.

“Sometimes, after everything is destroyed, they show up, but unless they have proof of everything, they don’t take actions. It’s better to take action,” she said. “I’ve been here around 22 years and I raised all my kids here. I have eight who have graduated from Lewiston High School. Whenever you experience the sounds of gunshots — it’s just so sad for everyone.”

This story is the first in a series of stories exploring gun violence in Lewiston. We will take a deep dive into how incidents of shots fired have affected the feeling of safety in the city, particularly in the downtown area where the majority of the shootings have taken place. As a part of the downtown community, the Sun Journal staff has taken a great deal of personal accountability on this topic in the interest of public safety. If you have personally been affected by gun violence in Lewiston and want to tell your story, you can email staff writer Joe Charpentier at jcharpentier@sunjournal.com. 

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