Abdo Ali Ahmed, 51
Reedley, Calif.
September 29 was shaping up as just another Saturday for Abdo Ali Ahmed. At 7 a.m., the 51-year-old Muslim from Yemen crossed the dusty lot from his family's modest home to his convenience store to begin a 14-hour workday.

He unlocked the doors and waited for customers to drop by for coffee, smokes and quiet conversation on their way to the orchards and packing houses of California's Central Valley.

Two days before, outside a supermarket in nearby Dinuba, Ahmed had found a death-threat note on his car's windshield: "We're going to kill all you [expletive] Arabs." According to family members, it wasn't the first threat Ahmed had gotten since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York.

When taunted or threatened in person, Ahmed would calmly reply, "I am a citizen."

When he found the note, he balled it up and threw it in the trash, telling one of his eight children not to bother calling the police.

"God will take care of it," he said.

But around 4 p.m. that Saturday afternoon, the threats were made real. Ahmed was shot three times in the torso, a few feet from the American flag he had taped in the window of his East Reedley Market.

Witnesses in the Hawg Jaws Bar next door saw two teenage men hop in a car with two others and speed away. Ahmed crawled into the bar, crumpled on the floor and died in his wife's arms while waiting for medical attention.

Three months later, Fatima Ahmed remained incapacitated by grief. "When they killed my husband," she said, "they killed me."

The Fresno County Sheriff's Department investigated Ahmed's murder as a botched robbery. They had made no arrests when the Spring 2002 issue of the Intelligence Report went to press.

Mohammad Rocka, a local activist, summed up sentiments in the local Muslim community: "Mr. Ahmed is one more victim of the tragedy of September 11."