St. Paul man sentenced to nearly 14 years for killing West Side store worker

Nick Ferraro, Pioneer Press
·6 min read
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Abdullah Arif’s wife said the couple escaped from Iraq to get away from the violence and killings of adults and children. They came to America to seek peace and to make a life here, Maeda Obaidi told the court Friday.

And Arif worked hard to learn the language and become a U.S. citizen, she said.

“He took care of me and my children and did his best to keep us safe,” she said in a statement that was read by a prosecutor and interpreted into the Arabic language. “We had hope and a vision of continuing to prosper here in America.”

But then Arif was “senselessly and violently taken away,” she said, by Elias-Kareem Hany Aly, who fatally shot the 48-year-old Stillwater father of four during a confrontation last year at Union Tobacco on St. Paul’s West Side where he worked part time.

“I lost the love of my life, and the children lost their loving father,” his wife said.

Ramsey County District Judge David Ireland went on to give Aly, 22, of St. Paul, 13 years and nine months in prison for the murder, denying a request from his attorney for a downward departure from state sentencing guidelines. The guidelines called for between nearly 12 and 16½ years.

In exchange for a February straight guilty plea to second-degree unintentional murder, the prosecution agreed to dismiss an intentional murder charge at sentencing.

Arif was killed after confronting Aly and his friends inside the store along Stryker Avenue and Stevens Street, then outside. Arif had asked Aly to remove a mask covering his face in the store and, as Aly left, he pulled down a door chime. Arif went outside with a baseball bat and up to their Dodge Durango. Aly shot him once while sitting in the front passenger seat, the bullet piercing his heart and liver.

Less than an hour before the killing, Aly was at the same downtown courthouse as Friday for a hearing on a June 2020 gross misdemeanor charge of possession of a firearm by an ineligible person.

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Aly was on conditional release from jail when he shot Arif after he posted a $200,000 bond in June 2022 in connection with a drive-by shooting in Maplewood. He was also on probation for three felony cases out of Dakota County — two for drug possession, the other for fleeing police in a motor vehicle — at the time of the murder.

After his sentencing Friday, in a separate hearing, Aly pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by an ineligible person for his role in the drive-by shooting.

Following the plea, Ireland gave Aly a five-year prison term, which will run concurrent with his murder sentence.

Collapsed into snow

St. Paul police were sent to the West Side smoke shop just after at 3:30 p.m. Feb. 16, 2023, and found Arif with a gunshot wound to the chest. He was pronounced dead at Regions Hospital.

Two store employees gave similar accounts of the shooting and what led up to it. They said four men came into the store. One of the men, later identified as Aly, wore a balaclava, which covered his head and face except for the area around his eyes. Arif asked Aly to remove the mask, but he refused and reportedly said, “You don’t need to see my (expletive) face,” the criminal complaint said.

Employees told police they explained to the group they don’t allow people to conceal their identities because of theft and other issues at the store.

The employee said a man with Aly used a credit card to make a purchase and Aly knocked down a door chime when he left. Arif noticed the chime was missing, grabbed a baseball bat from behind the counter and ran after the group.

The shooting was caught on surveillance video, which showed Arif near the driver’s side of the SUV and another employee on the passenger side. “(Arif) never raised the baseball bat as if to hit anything with it,” the criminal complaint said.

Arif approached the driver’s side window of the group’s Dodge Durango, and then moved back. The other employee “reacted to something” and Arif fell to the ground. He knelt in the street, as the employee helped him get up. He ran toward the sidewalk, then collapsed into a pile of snow.

About 45 minutes earlier, surveillance video showed Aly and another man, identified in the criminal complaint as QZ, walk out of the Ramsey County courthouse at 2:51 p.m. and leave in a Dodge Durango. The SUV headed south over the Wabasha Street bridge.

Video from the store, which is just over a mile from the courthouse, showed Aly in the same clothing that he had on at the court hearing and officers identified him as the shooter. QZ had rented the SUV from Enterprise.

In an interview with investigators, Aly was shown a photo that showed him at the courthouse that day. He initially claimed he didn’t recognize the photo. When told it was from his court appearance on previous gun charges, Aly said, “Oh, yeah,” the complaint said. He asked if he had a new charge, and then ended the interview.

‘My actions took a man’

In arguing for the downward departure Friday, Aly’s attorney, Frederick Goetz, told the court that in his view Arif was an “aggressor” in the incident and that Aly fired the shot because he was afraid.

“Mr. Aly acted under duress and therefore a durational departure is warranted and appropriate under the law,” Goetz said, while asking the judge for an eight-year, nine-month sentence.

Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Wesley Abrahamson said Aly and his friends were not in danger while sitting in the Durango. Abrahamson noted how QZ told police, “That man didn’t have to die.” QZ also “recognized that in his estimate, the worst outcome was some damage to his vehicle as a result of Mr. Arif’s actions,” Abrahamson said.

In his brief remarks to the court, which included an apology to Arif’s family, Aly said he “reacted out of fear and emotion … and there is no justifying what I did. I can’t blame anyone else for what I did. My actions took a man.”

While it’s clear Arif picked up a baseball bat and “charged up to the car, making him an aggressor,” the judge said, “looking at the totality of the circumstances, I don’t believe that that justified a compelling reason to grant a downward durational departure.”

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