‘Here, life is cheap’
By Peter Jamison
The Washington Post
January 3, 2010
It was one of the quietest hours of the day inside Holiday Market, and the gunfire, when it began, was clearly audible. Somewhere outside was the high-pitched report of a rapidly emptying handgun. The shots were not loud. But when Semere Abraha bolted from his convenience store’s tiny office and saw his clerk, Mike Yohannes — who was taking cover behind the cash registers — he had no doubt that they were close by.
Abraha turned to a monitor that displayed footage from his 16 surveillance cameras. And there, on the other side of the wall that separated him from the parking lot in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the nation’s capital, a teenage boy who had spent many hours browsing Abraha’s narrow aisles of Tastykake Coconut Juniors and Big Hug Fruit Barrels lay on the sidewalk, legs motionless, windmilling his arms.
Police would later recover the spent shell casings of nearly two dozen rounds of ammunition. Two bullets had hit and would soon kill Malik McCloud. One of them had lodged in his spine, paralyzing him instantly, and in the minutes before he lost consciousness — captured on Holiday Market’s grainy surveillance tapes — he never lost his look of surprise.
Abraha dialed 911 and mashed the button under a register that set off Holiday Market’s security alarm. Outside, a few young men began to gather around McCloud, but they scattered as a second barrage of gunfire swept the sidewalk. The dark Audi SUV that carried the 19-year-old’s killers was at the far end of the parking lot; a short man in skinny jeans and a black hoodie stepped out of the rear passenger seat and sprinted north on Wheeler Road in Southeast Washington, carrying a pistol. The Audi sped off to the south.
It was just before 2 p.m. on Oct. 20, 2018.
Abraha, an East African immigrant, had owned Holiday Market for four years. He had seen fights in the parking lot, thefts in the store aisles and drug-dealing at the threshold of the glass doors that chimed as customers came and went. But he had never seen death.
The murder of McCloud on that Saturday afternoon would herald a new and disturbing chapter in the long life of the bodega that has stood, under various names, for decades in the heart of Congress Heights. Seven months later, on May 26, 2019, another teenage boy would die in a drive-by shooting outside Abraha’s doors.
This time the gunfire would be louder, the victim younger — Maurice Scott, just 15 — and the attack seemingly more random. Abraha, stocking loaves of bread at the front of the store, would narrowly escape a fusillade that pierced and drained a row of two-liter bottles of Orange Crush.
Scott died at the start of an inordinately bloody summer, in a year when homicides in the District hit their highest level in a decade. The violence, concentrated in the predominantly black neighborhoods of Southeast Washington, has largely bypassed the booming business districts and condo canyons west of the Anacostia River.
Five Whole Foods stores have sprouted up to serve those parts of the city, with a sixth planned for the redeveloped campus of the former Walter Reed military hospital. But residents of Congress Heights continue to shop at Holiday Market, crossing the sidewalk where the blood of dying teenagers has been scrubbed clean twice. On Christmas Eve, three men were injured in yet another shooting outside the store.
For those in the surrounding neighborhood, the nearest grocery store is a mile away. And so they come and go from the convenience store — alone and with hip-high kids, on work breaks and before or after school, buying lottery tickets and Lunchables, hair extensions and canned chicken salad. Holiday Market is the hub of a community where danger is always present.
And at the center of that hub is Abraha, 34, a husband, father and unlikely witness to the District’s worsening violence. He fled the war-ravaged Horn of Africa 15 years ago, slipping across the border of Eritrea, one of the world’s most repressive and autocratic nations.
But it was in America’s capital city, he says, that he would finally learn what people are capable of doing to one another.
“At least we know, in my country, a human being is a very expensive thing,” Abraha says. “Here, life is cheap.”
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