The man who died in an October shootout with the FBI reached for a gun and told a police officer, “It’ll either be you or me,” during a 1980 arrest in Livonia, according to interviews and records obtained under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act.
Christopher Thomas, who later became Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, struggled with the officer for control of the gun, according to a report prepared soon after the Dec. 5, 1980, arrest by Livonia Police Officer Robert Stevenson, now the city’s police chief. Only after a second officer arrived was Abdullah disarmed, reports show.
“I should have killed him,” a police report says Abdullah told the second officer, referring to Stevenson.
David Wilkie, the now-retired Livonia officer who came to Stevenson’s aid, said in his report that the Detroit Police Department should be warned about Abdullah because “he seems committed to shooting a Detroit officer upon first and any contact.”
Abdullah was killed at a Dearborn warehouse on Oct. 28, shot 20 times by FBI agents after he allegedly fired a weapon and killed an FBI dog during an attempted arrest. Reports of an internal FBI investigation and a Dearborn police investigation into the incident have not yet been released, but community leaders have called for further investigations. One local leader, Abayomi Azikiwe of the Michigan Emergency Committee against War and Injustice, has described Abdullah’s killing as “a targeted assassination.”
The Livonia police reports detail the incident that led to Abdullah’s 1981 conviction for felonious assault on a police officer, for which he served 26 days in jail. They provide another view of the man some supporters have described as a peaceful observer of Islam but a criminal complaint describes as a radical separatist intent on killing police officers.
“This was as close as I’ve ever come to being seriously injured or killed in the line of duty,” said Stevenson, who as a young officer pulled over a car in which Abdullah, then known by his birth name of Christopher Thomas, was a passenger. Stevenson became police chief in 2004.
Stevenson said he pulled over the 1971 Ford for having no brake lights after he suspected the vehicle’s occupants were casing a convenience store. He asked Abdullah to step out of the car after a check showed an arrest warrant for a misdemeanor traffic offense.
When he asked Abdullah to place his hands on the back of the car to be searched, Abdullah wheeled around and reached for a .357 Magnum Colt Python he was carrying in a shoulder holster, Stevenson said.
The two struggled, with the gun just out of the holster and Stevenson’s hands clutching Abdullah’s right arm, the report says and Stevenson recalled.
Just after the “you or me” remark, when Stevenson told Abdullah he would kill him if he did not let go of the gun, Abdullah replied: “I want to die,” according to the report.
“If that other (patrol) car had not come by, it was a fight to the death,” Stevenson said. “You get real strong when you’re fighting for your life.”
‘Far-fetched’ connection
Nabih Ayad, a Canton Township attorney representing Abdullah’s widow, Amina, said the Livonia incident is almost three decades old and it’s “extremely far-fetched and without any credibility to somehow make a relation between that incident” and the circumstances around the imam’s death.
Omar Regan, 34, Abdullah’s son, said his father told him he went through a time of serious depression and believes the Livonia police report reflects that.
“I didn’t know everything about this particular incident; he didn’t give us every detail,” said Regan, an actor who splits his time between California and Michigan.
But Abdullah told his family he went through a time “when he really did want to die,” Regan said. He said his father emerged from his depression shortly after the Livonia incident and met H. Rap Brown, a former Black Panther and leader of Ummah, a group of African-American converts to Islam. Brown is serving a life sentence for homicide.
Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Michigan (CAIR), who has expressed concern about the FBI shooting and the autopsy report, said Tuesday he was aware Abdullah had a felony conviction but was not aware it was for an assault on a police officer.
“It doesn’t sound very positive at all in regard to that past circumstance,” Walid said. However, “I don’t know if that would correlate to the incident that took place in October of 2009.
“Any person who would threaten to harm the police or to make a statement that it’s either you or me, would be totally out of line,” Walid said.
According to the police report, Abdullah told Wilkie he was depressed and fed up with being harassed by Detroit police officers because he was a Muslim.
Match to current accounts
Though the reports of the Livonia incident are 30 years old, Abdullah’s apparent willingness to use a gun on a police officer is consistent with statements he allegedly made more recently to informants assisting with an FBI investigation of The Ummah, of which Abdullah was allegedly the Detroit area leader.
According to an affidavit in a criminal complaint sworn by an FBI agent the day before the imam was killed, “Abdullah told his followers that if the police try to take his weapons or try to apprehend him, he will respond with violence, and they will have to shoot him before they can arrest him.”
According to the affidavit, an informant told the FBI that Abdullah told followers not to carry a pistol if they planned to surrender it to police. “You give them a bullet,” he allegedly said.
The complaint, which also charged 10 of Abdullah’s alleged followers, charged the imam with crimes including conspiracy, selling stolen goods and being a felon in possession of a firearm. He and the others were targeted in an FBI sting operation in which informants dealt as people wanting to fence stolen TVs and other goods. The day of the killing, Abdullah and others were lured to the FBI-controlled warehouse in Dearborn, where the arrests were to be made.
Among the concerns cited by CAIR and other groups is the number of shots fired by four of the more than one dozen FBI agents at the scene, and the fact Abdullah was handcuffed and his body placed in a trailer after his death while the FBI dog was airlifted for medical treatment.
“There’s still a lot of information that we aren’t privy to,” Walid said. “There are still a lot of questions regarding that day on which Mr. Abdullah was killed.”