Three Failures Killed ​“The King”

The end of Mubarak Soulemane’s life began with an argument between brothers on Jan. 14, 2020.

Saeed Soulemane was chilling in his family’s two-story Fair Haven duplex when his brother Mubarak stormed into the room and exploded in rage. Mubarak had found a random piece of his clothing in Saeed’s room and ​“spazzed out,” Saeed said.

“Don’t touch my stuff,” Mubarak yelled. His usually-glowing face looked droopy, like somebody going through withdrawal.

“Bro, this been here for hellas. Why are you tweaking about this now?” Saeed retorted. 

In the moment, Saeed thought his brother was just being a ​“knucklehead.” In hindsight, he realized that his brother had been spiraling into a schizophrenic episode with paranoid delusions. 

Eventually, Mubarak called their mother, who would usually be the one to talk him down during a crisis. She was in Ghana at the time visiting family. All she could do was tell Saeed to relax and instruct one of the boys to leave before they hurt each other.

Before Mubarak left their house, he said to Saeed, ​“Bro, I’m sorry.”

“I was like ​‘Bro, nah.’ I didn’t even accept the sorry like I should’ve,” Saeed said.

By the next day, his brother would be dead, shot by a state trooper while in the grip of a schizophrenic episode.

Mubarak, who was both African-American and Muslim, would become one of the roughly 25 percent of civilians killed annually by police violence who suffer from mental illness. He was 19 years old.

About 250 mentally ill individuals are killed by police each year, making those with severe mental illness 16 times more likely to die from a police encounter than those without such conditions, according to a 2015 study conducted by the national mental illness nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center.

In the vast majority of municipalities in the U.S., police are the de facto first responders to mental health emergencies. Yet the vast majority of states do not require police officers to regularly go through mental health response training.

Connecticut is one such state. The only mental illness training required and given to every Connecticut police officer is the eight hours of mental health first aid lessons during their 1,340-hour basic officer training course. Yet, no less than 1 in 10 calls to the police involve individuals with severe mental illness, according to the 2015 Treatment Advocacy Center study.

For Brian North, the state trooper who shot the Fair Havener seven times, the last time he would have been required to undergo mental health response training would have been four and a half years prior, when he joined the force.

A growing movement of police reform and abolition activists are calling for police to step back altogether in responding to mental health calls and make way for psychologists and social workers, who are better trained than gun-toting cops in dealing with mentally ill individuals. (Click on the video to be taken to the police body cam video of the killing.)

At least two out of the eight people killed by Connecticut police in the year before Mubarak’s death suffered from mental illness. In the year after Mubarak was shot, a family in Philadelphia called police for help to deal with their bipolar brother only to have the police shoot him on arrival. A suicidal man named Daniel Prude was asphyxiated by police hours after he was released from the hospital for psychiatric treatment. Now, Mubarak Soulemane, a cheerful college student with no prior criminal record, will have his name added to the ledger of mental health patients killed by the police.

Meanwhile, his family awaits justice. The state has not yet concluded whether or not it will charge Trooper North with a crime. A lawsuit is in the works. As the nation marks the first anniversary of the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, the full story of the 2020 police killing of New Haven’s Soulemane remains to be written.

But a life lost has not been forgotten.

“The King”

Ten-year-old Joey Benincaso could tell by the way the new kid walked into the classroom that he wasn’t afraid of nothing.

The Polo shirt showed off the kid’s thin, athletic build, and his twinkling eyes complemented an even smile. As the teacher introduced Mubarak Soulemane along with two other boys to Joey’s fifth grade class at Wolf Pit Elementary, Joey, like his classmates, sized them up, deciding who should be chosen for whose basketball team.

“I just picked him right away,” Joey said. ​“I got him, no ​‘ifs’ ​‘ands’, or ​‘buts.’ I got him. That’s how we became right-hand mans.”

Mubarak was the third child of Ghanian immigrants, born in 2000 in a Bronx housing project. He was raised for the early years of his life in the Zongo town of Nima, Ghana. There, his older brother, Saeed, said, he picked up the art of ​“everyday hustling.” At 5 or 6, he created a Youtube channel called ​“Mubarak da King” in which he sang made-up songs. It would become the namesake of a nickname his middle school friends later had for him: the King.

One day in sixth grade, Joey saw Mubarak wearing tie-dye socks. Mubarak asked if Joey wanted to help him tie-dye more socks to sell. In Joey’s front yard, they twisted, rubber-banded and dunked white Nike socks into tie-dye they bought from the Walmart near their favorite gym, and sold the psychedelic creations for ten dollars apiece, five if the person provided their own socks. Soon, almost everybody in their friend group had a pair.

“We always had that money mindset,” Joey said. At age 11, Joey and Mubarak already knew how to make a dollar into two. They knew how to buy rainbow-coloured multi pens from Staples and sell them to classmates for a profit. They knew they could hawk alligator pencils that Joey brought home from Florida for ten dollars (“That’s where our marketing skills came along,” Joey said. ​“The pencil’s from Florida! So it cost more.”).

But, at age 11, there were many things that Joey and Mubarak did not yet know.

Spiralling

In sixth grade, Mubarak’s merchandising side-hustles meant extra pocket money to buy Arizonas, Gatorades, and chips from the corner store down the street from their favorite basketball court. As a teenager, he began to earn real money from trading hundreds of pairs of Air Jordans and Nikes, basketball shoes, and Vans, on eBay, Instagram, social media, and in school.

With his savings, Mubarak bought his own car not once, but twice. The first was a second-hand 2007 Hyundai Sonata, which his mother, Omo Mohammed, did not let him drive because of his mental illness. His second, at 18, was a 2008 Mercedes-Benz E-Class.

Mubarak’s adult goal was to become an entrepreneur, but as a kid, his goal was to play professional basketball. He won an athletic scholarship to play basketball for Notre Dame High School in West Haven.

“Mubi took the game serious,” said Joey, recalling how Mubarak would practicing dribbling with a tennis ball and putting the hoop at the standard ten-feet high, even as a five-foot-tall middle schooler. In one video snapped by Joey, Mubarak is in a gym, dribbling a basketball in a neat figure-of-eight pattern around his ankles, behind his back. He stared coolly at the camera as his toned body moved in perfect harmony with the ball. His varsity basketball career culminated in his team winning the 2018 state championship for the first time in their high school’s history. In the crowded Mohegan Sun Arena, surrounded by news cameras’ flashing lights, Mubarak and his teammates whooped and hollered, thumping each other on the back.

Most of Mubarak’s classmates and neighbors did not know that the handsome, broad-shouldered, basketball and lacrosse star who always wore the latest fashion, who produced his own R&B songs and who knew how to make everyone laugh suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, a debilitating psychotic disorder known to cause hallucinations and delusions.

Mariyann, Mubarak’s older sister, was the first person to witness his symptoms of schizophrenia. In the summer of 2016, while she was at work, she received a call from her brother.

“People want to kill me,” he said. Mariyann was a bookish college freshman who had been her high school’s yearbook editor-in-chief. She thought her brother was just having a bad trip. Months later, after a repeat episode, a doctor at Yale-New Haven Hospital diagnosed Mubarak with paranoid schizophrenia and prescribed him antipsychotic medication.

Mubarak’s paranoid delusions ranged from specific anxieties, such as that schoolmates were going to sabotage him or that a white woman was chasing him, to a pervasive, generalized sense that someone wanted to kill him. When he was in a state of mania or psychosis, Mubarak would snap at his siblings or scream in his little brother’s face.

“Oh my god, my room is such a mess,” he would say.

That is how Mariyann and Omo would know that he was “spiraling,” as they refer to his schizophrenic episodes.

At night, he’d pace from his room, to Saeed’s room, to Mariyann’s room, to Omo’s room, waking everybody up. He would fall asleep on his mother’s bedroom floor, which was one of the only ways he could get a few hours of sleep.

The medication made him drowsy at inconvenient times. On one occasion in 2019, Mubarak, Joey and their friend, Christos, returned to Joey’s house to swim after a hot day washing Mercedes Benzes at their Splash Car Wash job. It was the first summer after nearly a year of Mubarak’s conspicuous absence from their hangouts; he had spent most of the 2018 to 2019 school year going in and out of psych wards.

They noticed he was more jittery than usual. His hands shook. But they had never before treated their friend differently because of his diagnosis. That summer day, by 6 p.m., Mubarak was passed out asleep on the couch. His friends went swimming while he slept until the next morning.

“He didn’t want to be stereotyped by his friends. He didn’t want to be different. He wanted to be doing things that his friends were doing,” Mariyann said.

Mubarak had difficulty separating his sickness from who he was as a person. For the last year and a half of his life, Mariyann and Omo hired a nurse to come to their house daily, unlock a big black briefcase where they kept Mubarak’s ever-changing buffet of antipsychotic medication, hand him the pills in a cup, and make sure he swallowed. ​“He always tried to reject the sickness,” she said. ​“And that’s what became a vicious cycle of him stopping the meds and thinking, ​‘I’m normal. Why do I have to take this?’”

Christos and Joey felt protective of Mubarak, especially when their peers called him ​“crazy’“and distanced themselves from him. ​“I never ever, ever, ever, looked at it like it was a negative thing. It was like, he’s still Mubi,” said Christos.

Failure #1: Police Not Qualified

When Saeed woke up to an empty house the morning after he got into an argument with his brother, a sinking feeling of worry began to creep into his chest. He called the Norwalk police.

“I’m worried about my brother,” he remembers telling them. “We got into a little argument. He should’ve been back home.”

He didn’t make an official missing person report, but he wanted to make sure the police were aware of the situation

By then, Saeed had realized Mubarak needed to take his meds. It wasn’t safe for him to be wandering around Norwalk alone.

“I dont think [the police] are qualified to deal with people who have mental illness,” said Mariyann. “This is becoming a ridiculous trend in Connecticut and beyond. They’re killing people with mental illness.”

A few cities, including New Haven, have started or are preparing pilot programs for mobile crisis teams that would respond to emergencies best dealt with by social workers rather than by police. It seems senseless, if not contradictory, to entrust a law enforcement body designed to combat crime, not illness, with the responsibility of being the first responders to individuals in mental health crises. This long-standing policy failure of imagination has cost the lives of hundreds of mentally ill individuals from Sandra Bland to Mubarak Soulemane.

The afternoon after Saeed reported his brother missing, Joey was playing basketball with friends in New Canaan when he received a text from Mubarak. “I’m coming to Norwalk meet me at LA fitness,” Mubarak wrote. Joey hopped into his car and as he drove, scrolled through Snapchat with one hand.

What he saw made him drive a lot faster. Mubarak had posted on the app.

In one of the snaps, Mubarak was videoing gym-goers playing basketball. “Hey bro, missing a shot,” Joey could hear him yelling. In another, he was screaming across the gym at a friend of theirs, “Yo Hunter, what up bro!” As Joey was driving, Hunter called him and said Mubarak was at the gym being loud and obnoxious. Joey knew then that Mubarak was off his medication and needed immediate help. 

As Joey drove up to LA Fitness, he saw “about 30 cops” at the strip mall along Main Avenue. Things didn’t click until the next morning, when he found out why the cops were really there. It was well past 4 p.m. when Joey arrived at the gym and Mubarak was not answering his phone. He figured Mubarak had gone home or been taken to a hospital. “I never thought something like that could lead to this,” Joey said, expression grim.

The same sentiment was echoed by Saeed: “He spiralled like this before and he made it back home safe, so I’m not here thinking, ‘I’m about to lose my brother.’”

How did a typical occurrence for a schizophrenic teenager end in him being killed by the police? That question continues to haunt Saeed til this day.

Mariyann thinks she has the answer: multiple failures by the Norwalk, West Haven and state police compounded to cause Mubarak’s fate.

Minutes before Joey rolled into the parking lot of LA Fitness, Mubarak had been kicked out. The gym manager had called the police to report “an unwanted guest” who was “pacing in front of the gym and was acting strange.” A Norwalk police officer was dispatched to LA Fitness, where he questioned Mubarak before letting him go.

By that point, Saeed had reported Mubarak as missing to the police, so the officer should have made the connection, Joey and Christos emphasized when they recalled this day one year later, sitting on the same plush leather couch in Joey’s house where Mubarak once fell asleep at 6’o’clock.

“I know how police think,” said Christos, becoming visibly agitated. “They probably thought, ‘Oh, people are going to think we’re racist ‘or something like that. But at that point, you just think of it as the humane thing to do is notify the parents … But they just let him go! He was this close to being in Norwalk Police Department’s hands rather than being in the state troopers’ hand who don’t even know nothing about him.”

The police let Mubarak, lost in a schizophrenic episode, take the four-minute walk across the Norwalk River to the AT&T store on Main Avenue. There, beside the Subway where Mubi and Joey used to spend the money they earned selling crocodile pencils on sandwiches, he would be reported to the police for the second time that day.

Failure #2: Broken Telephone

At 4.:15 p.m., Mubarak, wearing black pink pants, entered the AT&T store.

He told the employees that his phone was acting up and he wanted a new one. The AT&T salesperson ran a credit check on him.

Alex Moses, the store manager, advised Mubarak that he had a poor credit rating and would have to put down a large amount of money up front for the phone he wanted. Frustrated, Mubarak walked out.

Minutes later, he reentered and accused the employees of “disconnecting” his phone. Moses stated that they were not capable of disconnecting his phone.

Then Mubarak pulled an eight-inch steak knife from his pocket and stated he wanted a new phone.

“You can’t be in here with a knife,” Moses said.

“It’s for my safety,” Mubarak replied. In incident reports, Moses states that Mubarak never raised the knife, but kept it concealed in his hand. Moses calmly asked him to leave.

As Mubarak turned to exit, he attempted to grab a display phone. Moses took it back and told him to leave. Norwalk police were called by the AT&T store manager at 4:36 p.m.

Crucially, the police dispatcher reporting the call from the AT&T store manager to the Norwalk police had said “it did not sound like there were any threats made and that they were not reporting a robbery.”

This nuance — that Mubarak was armed but not necessarily dangerous — was lost in communication as police would thereafter refer to Mubarak as an “armed subject,” a broad phrase which can describe anyone from a terrorist with a machine gun to a teenager with a steak knife.

Mubarak had been in the almost-identical situation before — consumed by schizophrenic delusions in a store, reported to the police by the manager — with one exception: he didn’t have a knife. In early 2017, Omo Mohammed received a call from the Norwalk police that her son had been taking his clothes off in a gas station. Upon arrival, the police realized he was having a mental health crisis and sent him to Norwalk hospital. “Mubarak was not Mubarak,” Omo said. He was transferred to a rehabilitation center in New York, where he stayed for a month. Because of this incident and one other, the Soulemane family believes that the Norwalk police should have had it on record that Mubarak was schizophrenic, and when they received the call about the mentally ill man at the AT&T on January 15th, they should have recognized the situation as one of a mental crisis.

At 4.33 p.m. Mubarak hopped into a white Hyndai Sonata, a Lyft. “Drive,” he said.

After two blocks, Mubarak thumped the back of the driver’s head and demanded his phone. The driver pulled into a Shell station, jumped out of the car and drew a handgun, pointing it at Mubarak.

Extreme stress and trauma have been shown to trigger psychotic episodes. Aiming a gun at a paranoid schizophrenic in crisis may deepen their paranoia.

At that moment, the police officer who responded to the AT&T store call arrived at the Shell Station. He raced toward the besieged white sedan, firearm drawn and aimed in the low-ready position.

Mubarak “appeared very apprehensive” to the officer. He would later be seen on surveillance footage leaping out of the back seat, sliding into the driver’s seat of the Lyft, locking the doors, and speeding off toward the highway.

Officers in three Norwalk police cruisers briefly chased Mubarak along the highway, reaching speeds of 90 miles per hour.

After about 4.85 miles, concerned about the danger of a high-speed chase and rush hour traffic, the commanding Sgt. Justin Bisceglie asked the dispatcher if there was any act of violence at the AT&T store. Dispatch stated that the knife was only displayed. Because Mubarak had not committed any clear violent crime, Bisceglie terminated the pursuit.

He was acting in line with the state police motor vehicle pursuit policy, adopted in 2019. The rules bar police officers from chasing stolen vehicles unless the officer has reasonable suspicion to believe that a person in the vehicle “has committed, is attempting to commit or will imminently commit a crime of violence (actual or threatened),” or if there is “potential for harm to the public if apprehension does not occur.”

After that point, things began to go wrong, very fast. The communication between the original 911 dispatcher, to Norwalk Police, to state police, resembled a game of broken telephone.

Although the original 911 dispatcher had already advised Norwalk police that Mubarak had made no threats at the AT&T store, a Norwalk police officer, while chasing Mubarak, insisted to state police that threats were made.

“Okay well, this is more than a stolen [vehicle]. This guy displayed a knife, was threatening inside the AT&T store and then he either got into a vehicle with a cohort or he carjacked somebody and took their car,” he said to the state police’s Troop G, to which Brian North belonged.

Within that statement, the officer told two falsehoods: The 911 dispatcher had said Mubarak had not made any threats in the AT&T store. And Mubarak had no cohorts.

The officer also omitted at least two pieces of vital information — that the knife was an 8-inch steak knife and that Mubarak was “messed up” and non-responsive, which might have given the state police reason to think he was mentally ill.

State police would later justify the deadly car chase by citing this brief conversation. Without these claims, the state trooper’s pursuit of Mubarak may have been in violation of the pursuit policy.

Failure # 3: ‘He’s Contained And Isolated.”

Just after 5 p.m., West Haven patrol Officer Robert Rappa jumped out of his sergeant’s undercover police SUV. He had arrived at an underpass beneath the Interstate-95 to respond to a state police dispatch that they were in pursuit of a white Hyndai, allegedly taken in a carjacking.

In the late-afternoon shadow of the highway underpass, Rappa saw that three police cruisers had surrounded the white sedan driven by Mubarak Soulemane.

The cars had boxed him in on all three sides, the underpass’ concrete wall on the fourth. The half-hour high-speed chase ended when Mubarak’s car had struck the back of a civilian’s SUV and the three state police troopers swarmed upon him, at least two guns drawn and aimed.

Amid the cacaphony of wailing sirens, Rappa neared the passenger side window. He caught his first and last glimpse of Mubarak Soulemane, sitting motionless, staring straight ahead.

“I wasn’t certain if the operator was injured or under the influence of alcohol or drugs,” Rappa wrote in the incident report.

Law enforcement expert Elliot Spector, who has spent 35 years training police officers, said that a person not responding to instructions, staring blankly ahead, and not moving signals that they are in a mental health crisis. However, symptomatic of a nationwide lack of mental health training in police forces, neither Rappa nor any of the five other officers present expressed the idea that the teenager might be mentally ill and in crisis.

None of the police officers present attempted to de-escalate the situation. Only once in the body cam footage does an officer speak directly to Mubarak. ​“Get out of the car,” a state trooper, Joshua Jackson, yells twice, as he first runs toward Mubarak’s vehicle. But the multitude of police sirens drowns out his voice. It is unclear if Mubarak ever heard the command. Yet the state police release on the incident would claim that ​“State Police and West Haven Police attempted to get the driver out of the vehicle.”

All four windows of Mubarak’s car were up. In technical police terms, Mubarak was ​“contained and isolated” and posed no harm to anyone, said Mark Arons, a lawyer now representing the Soulemane family in a wrongful death suit. The only concern was Mubarak harming himself. Arons said there was no need for law enforcement to have their weapons drawn, that they could have waited it out or called for their supervisor’s assistance.

Rappa decided to smash the window to pull Mubarak out of the car. Five times, he struck the passenger-side window.

The thuds rang out like gunshots. The window shattered.

Trooper Jackson fired his Taser at Mubarak.

What happened in the next five seconds would become a major point of dispute and a key to the legal question of whether Trooper Brian North was justified in gunning down a civilian.

Mubarak, who had sat stock-still the entire time, finally moved. In the video, you can see him turning his torso toward the officer who had just Tasered him, his right hand reaching down. Arons said that when tased, you are bound to move, and that Mubarak may well have been reaching for his seatbelt.

Unfortunately, in that moment, what Mark Arons thought did not matter. What Mubarak Soulemane thought did not matter. What Saeed, or Joey, or Christos, or Omo Mohammed thought did not matter. The only person whose thoughts who mattered was Brian North. And because North decided that Mubarak Soulemane, sitting alone and surrounded in an enclosed car with nothing but a steak knife on his lap, was a threat, Mubarak Soulemane is dead.

“He’s reaching for something,” Rappa yelled, reaching for his sidearm but Trooper Brian North beat him to it.

Seven gunshots rang out.

“He’s got a knife,” North shouted at the unmoving teenager. Mubarak was slumped toward the passenger seat, fists clenched, mouth hanging open, blood blooming in the center of his chest.

“Drop the knife. Drop the knife!” North shouted.

Mubarak was pronounced dead at the hospital at 6.03 p.m. The cause of death: multiple gunshot wounds and non-survivable injury to the chest.

$10M Suit Planned

“They gunned down my brother like he was an animal, literally had no where to go,” Saeed said a year later. Mubarak was just three highway exits shy of their house when the police ​“caged him in.”

“My brother was probably trying to come home to me.”

“What sense does it make to go shoot seven times?” Omo said one year after her son was killed.

She sat inside her Fair Haven home, where her son’s briefcase of medication still rests in a corner of the living room.

“He just saw a black guy, and he has to be murdered. He just saw a black guy and he has to be put down. As long as it’s a black guy, he has to be murdered, because there’s no reason for him to shoot seven times, no reason.”

The Soulemane family has hired attorney Arons, and plans to file a $10 million wrongful death suit against the state, the state police, the city of West Haven and the West Haven Police Department.

“State Trooper Brian North has been on desk duty, hasn’t been fired. He still gets to go home to his wife and kids, protected by the union,” said Saeed. The state police release on the incident would claim that they and the West Haven police ​“initially deployed less-lethal means (Taser), which was ineffective. When the driver displayed a weapon (later determined to be a knife), a Trooper on scene discharged his assigned duty pistol, striking the driver.”

Of the 76 state investigations into officer-involved killings in Connecticut since 2001, only 1 police officer has been charged. Mariyann is pessimistic about the possibility that she and her family will succeed.

“Honestly I have no faith in our system. It’s not made for us. It’s not made for people with my skin,” said Mariyann. ​“My family we hold onto our faith very strong. And that’s what we pray for, for him to have justice beyond earth.”

On the one-year anniversary of his murder, Saeed, Mariyann, Omo, Joey, Christos and dozens of others gathered in the underpass where Mubarak was killed for a vigil. They lit colorful candles, laid down roses, and chalked messages of love on the wall.

“Mubi in our hearts forever,” read one of them. Mariyann prays for Allah to grant Mubarak Jannat al-firdaus, eternal paradise.

Joey believes Mubarak is watching over him, conquering the highest highs. He has made a line of sweatshirts to honor Mubarak, a fulfilment of Mubarak’s dream of starting his own clothing line.

One of them, printed with a photo of Mubarak in a coral pink blazer at his high school prom, reads, ​“Rest up young King.” And so he shall.