Owatonna Burning Car Death Ruled a Suicide, Family Disagrees
Members of the Somali community from Waite Park, near St. Cloud, are identifying the man that was found dead in his burning car near Owatonna on Sunday, as 39-year-old Ahmed Farah.
The Steele County Sheriff’s Office is saying that information from witnesses at the scene, and evidence obtained from the vehicle and at autopsy, has led them to rule out homicide as a cause of death.
According to Farah’s family, the department told them Farah committed suicide, a conclusion the family is very unhappy with.
According to a press release from the Steele County Sheriff’s, authorities were alerted to a burning vehicle on the 5000 block of County Road 45, about two miles south of Owatonna around nine o’clock on Sunday night.
After fire crews put out the blaze, a deceased individual was found inside.
Late this afternoon, the wife of Ahmed Farah and about a dozen members of the Somali community from Waite Park were told that authorities believed the man in the vehicle was her husband, and that they believed his death was a suicide.
But the family doesn’t believe Farah (who came to the country less than a year ago from a Ugandan refugee camp to be with his wife, three children, and another child on the way) would drive more than a hundred and thirty miles, to a city they say he has no connection to, and decide to commit suicide by burning himself alive.
Mohamoud Mohamed, head of the St. Cloud Area Somali Salvation Organization, and who traveled with Farah’s wife and several others to Owatonna today, says, “The police told us they recited their conclusion before they received the autopsy, the toxicology report and medical report of the deceased. We asked them to give us the basis of their conclusion, and they said ‘no, we know it was suicide’.”
According to the group I spoke with today, Farah was last seen Saturday morning, telling his wife he was going to get some air, and that he’d be back shortly for breakfast.
When she called his cell phone a half hour later, it was turned off.
That means there was about 36 hours from last contact to the moment he died in his car in Owatonna, a two-hour drive from his home in Waite Park.
Mohamed says, “This is the lighter that started the fire, which is still intact. [We’d expect it to explode.]”
The Steele County Sheriff’s Office apparently released all of Farah’s belongings to the family today, and told them they can take the body from the Rochester Mayo Clinic Medical Examiner’s Office for funeral services.
key.com