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24 FEBRUARY 2016 · 808 EAST LEWIS STREET
On the afternoon of 24 February 2016, a young man named Aboubakar Souleimane stopped by a vacant house at 808 East Lewis Street — a house the neighborhood knew as a hangout for the young people of Fort Wayne's East African community — and found three bodies inside. He called 911. Police, called to the house just after 5:30 p.m., identified the dead as Mohamedtaha Omar, 23; Adam Kamel Mekki, 20; and Muhannad Adam Tairab, 17. Each had been shot multiple times. The county coroner ruled the deaths homicides — the second, third and fourth of the city's year — and the city's Public Safety Director, Rusty York, described the killings to reporters as “execution style.” It was the first triple homicide in Fort Wayne in more than a decade.
For its first weeks the case belonged as much to the nation's argument about itself as to the police. The three were young men of the city's Sudanese community — Omar and Tairab Muslim, Mekki a Christian — and in the first days, with no suspects and no motive stated, the killings were widely feared to be a hate crime; the Council on American-Islamic Relations spoke, a founder of the Darfur People's Association spoke for the families, and the case drew national coverage under the remembrance name the community gave it, “Our Three Brothers.” The victims were not known to police as gang-involved; the house itself, it was reported afterward, had been watched in the weeks before the killings by the department's gang and violent-crimes unit; and federal investigators assisted the city police. The resolution, when it came that September, was of a different character entirely. On 9 September 2016 the State charged Artavius G. Richards, 19, with three counts of felony murder and a firearm enhancement, and Darrell L. McDaniel, 19, was charged alongside him. The case the courts record is a robbery: on the afternoon of the killings, a driver named Jasmine Griffin had taken Richards, McDaniel and a third man, George Stiner, across the east side to buy marijuana; the talk in the car turned to “lashing” — robbing — and the three men went into the Lewis Street house and came out about five minutes later. At trial, prosecutors said McDaniel shot one of the victims and Richards shot the other two.
The law's course took two trials. Richards's first trial, in November 2016, ended with a jury that deliberated more than eight hours and could not reach a verdict. Retried from 30 January to 2 February 2017 before Allen Superior Judge John F. Surbeck, he was convicted on all counts. On 6 March 2017 the court sentenced him to sixty years on each of the three felony-murder counts, consecutive, plus ten years for the firearm enhancement — one hundred ninety years in all. McDaniel, whose murder charges were dropped under a plea agreement, pleaded guilty to robbery and was sentenced in April 2017 to twenty years. The Court of Appeals affirmed Richards's convictions on 6 December 2017; the Indiana Supreme Court denied transfer; and on 15 March 2024 the Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of his post-conviction petition, closing the case's appellate record. In the city's memory the case is held by the community that lost the three young men: it is remembered under the name they were given in the first week's vigils — our three brothers — and it remains the measure of how a national story and a local robbery can be the same event, told two ways, with the court record the only version that ends.
Sources:
- Richards v. State, No. 02A04-1703-CR-646 (Ind. Ct. App. 6 December 2017), and No. 23A-PC-484 (Ind. Ct. App. 15 March 2024)
- Allen County Coroner's Office releases, February 2016; Associated Press and Indianapolis Star case explainers, February–March 2016
- The Indiana Lawyer, trial, sentencing and accomplice-sentencing coverage, February–April 2017