By Joe Penney
An unknown assailant shot at least five bullets at the residence of a witness to the January 30th police killing of Dolal Idd in Minneapolis, the day after Mr. Idd was killed, the witness told Sahelien.com. The witness had posted multiple videos and photos on social media saying that no ambulance had arrived on the scene by the time she left the area, about 30 minutes after the shooting.
On January 30, at around 6 pm, the witness, who asked not to identified due to concerns for her safety, had entered the convenience store at the Holiday gas station at E 36th St and Cedar Ave. in south Minneapolis, as she prepared to deliver pizza for her job. She saw police officers with their guns out approach the white car that Idd was driving with his passenger, a woman who has not been identified, after kettling the car.
She heard multiple shots, and about a dozen people came running into the convenience store. The gas station attendants locked everyone in the store for their safety, and they were only allowed to leave after being questioned by police 20 minutes later. There has been little information about the woman passenger in the car, and while police told media that she was not hurt, that could not be independently verified.
“I was really shocked that there was no ambulance anywhere. The shooting probably started around 6:10. He was probably dead by 6:12. And by 6:30, there was no ambulance. The hospital that would have responded to their call is less than two miles away. And as a delivery driver I can tell you that if it takes me, it takes me less than five minutes to get from that hospital to that gas station,” the witness said. There were more than a dozen cop cars at the scene of the shooting, she said, and she saw more coming as she was leaving.
After she left the gas station, she posted a video on TikTok calling attention to the fact that no ambulance had come to the scene. The next day, she posted more videos and tweets to her Twitter account about the shooting, disputing accounts she had heard that an ambulance was on the scene.
That night at 11 pm, while the witness was at work, an unknown assailant fired at least five shots into the living room and kitchen area of the witness’s private residence, she said. She was not at home, but her sister and her sister’s boyfriend, both of whom live with her, were at her house and nearly got hit, she said.
“It looked like they drove past and shot five bullets into my house. All the rooms that have big windows, that’s what was shot at,” she explained. “(My sister) was in the living room and (her boyfriend) was walking to the bathroom. The bullets came through the living room and into her bedroom,” she said. Several of the bullets are still lodged in the walls of the house.
When she first called 911, the operator hung up on her, the witness said. The police who responded to her second 911 call threatened to arrest her for taking pictures of the bullet casings on the street in front of her house, she said, and then told her the shots might have been aimed at someone who was living in the house before she moved in. The problem with that theory is that the previous tenants had moved out of the house in 2018, and the home had been unoccupied until the witness moved in, in August 2020.
“They basically concluded it was random. They didn’t talk to any of the neighbors, didn’t ask many questions, didn’t take very many pictures, and didn’t do a lot inside the house,” she said of the police investigation. “Everybody’s pretty shaken up right now.”
The witness said she thinks police targeted her for posting the videos online. “I want to believe that this has nothing to do with the fact that I saw police kill somebody and then follow through with a bunch of misconduct, that I post about it, and this is just random,” she explained. “But I’m feeling a lot like a fish in a barrel.”
Minneapolis police also raided the Dolal Idd’s family house at 2 am the night of his killing, handcuffing his whole family, including three children, ages 4, 7, and 9, as they ransacked the house for two hours, according to interviews that Dolal Idd’s father Bayle Adod Gelle gave to Sahan Journal and Star Tribune reporter Chao Xiong. Police only informed the family that they had killed Dolal Idd as they were leaving the house, the family said.
“Imagine your son getting killed, and then getting a visit from those who killed him and they terrorize you in your home?” Bayle said to Sahan Journal about the police raid.