In the Name of the Father - Page 6

That same year, the Panthers led a boycott of a Korean-owned beauty-supply store located in a black neighborhood on Indy’s east side. Concerned that the Koreans were taking money out of the community, Ajabu’s troops picketed the store and demanded the owner make a $200 monthly donation to the Panthers to help set up social programs for local residents. Many saw Ajabu’s strong-arm tactics as extortion, or at least, cowardly bullying. But the city somehow found no legal wrongdoing, and the storeowner eventually acquiesced.

In early 1994, Ajabu served notice to the city and Mayor Stephen Goldsmith that if conditions for blacks didn’t improve by the end of the year, the militia would go on the offensive, and bloodshed would ensue. The threat made national news. “We’re tired of the conditions that African-Americans are living under,” Ajabu told The Wall Street Journal. “We believe that revolution is the solution.” Goldsmith told The Indianapolis Star that Ajabu and his followers were “one of the most destructive forces in ... race relations in Indianapolis.”

While all of this was going on, Ajabu was raising a family in turmoil. Nzinga, now a psychiatrist outside Atlanta, remembers a softer side of her father who played tennis and made pancakes with her, but she also remembers a dad who had trouble putting aside the militant front. Jane recalls a husband who was more concerned with his political world than with working for the white man and making house payments like his father died doing. A husband who was angry and often misplaced his anger on the family. He took Kofi to Panther meetings and marches. Nzinga remembers waking up in the middle of the night to phone calls of men screaming, “Go back to fucking Africa!” and “We’re going to kill you niggers!” And Kofi remembers a father who was “as much a commander in chief as a father,” who taught him to shoot at age 7, trained him in self-defense in preparation for a revolution that could come at any time, and who instilled in him the notion that pain was necessary for revolution.

On the morning of March 17, 1994, police discovered the bodies of three youths—17-year-old Nick Allemenos, his 13-year-old sister, Lisa, and his 23-year-old friend, Chris James—in pools of blood in a ransacked Carmel home. Each had been bound and gagged with duct tape, throats slit. News of the grisly crime rocked the city.

The next day, Ajabu was in bed when the morning TV news announced that authorities had arrested three suspects. Then he saw 21-year-old Kofi, in handcuffs, being walked across the screen.

What had been intended as a simple robbery for rent money had somehow escalated into a triple homicide. Kofi had been implicated along with co-worker James Walls and Walls’s roommate, Raymond Adams. Ajabu had met the two men on several occasions, and had warned Kofi to stay away. Still, when Kofi told him that he never intended to kill anyone—and, in fact didn’t—Ajabu believed him.

Kofi was charged with 10 felonies, including three counts of murder, for which Hamilton County prosecutor Steve Nation announced he was seeking the death penalty. Debra Meyer, mother of two of the victims, voiced her support.

The idea that his son might be executed infuriated Ajabu. In April 1994, outside the Hamilton County courthouse after a pretrial hearing, Ajabu addressed the press. “I want to serve notice as a father,” he said. “If my son is killed for something he did not do, other death sentences will be carried out.” He later elaborated to the Indianapolis Recorder: “If Steve Nation or this legal system or anybody ... kills my child for something he didn’t do, they will cause me to kill people for something they didn’t do. I’m going to play by the rules … made by Steve Nation and supported by Debra Meyer.”

A white Indianapolis that had previously seen Ajabu and his rhetoric as little more than a novelty or at worst, a distant threat, now read newspaper headlines such as: “Murder suspect’s dad vows retaliation.” The Indianapolis News ran an editorial titled “Ajabu doesn’t get it,” in which reporter John Krull wrote, “Ajabu did what he always does. He took an ugly situation and made it even more ugly … Instead of realizing that violence already has wreaked enough horror in this community, he offers more violence, more horror.” In turn came letters to the editor cursing Ajabu: “What did Kofi Ajabu learn from his father? He learned hate and racism, for starters.”

Nation and Meyer took Ajabu’s words as direct threats. “My wife was scared to death,” remembers Nation. “I never felt (Ajabu) was going to pull the trigger, but I thought his rhetoric would inspire some youth looking to move up in his ranks.” Meyer later testified that she was terrified. “She couldn’t even attend the trial,” says George Allemenos, Meyers’ ex-husband and father of the two teens. “Here was a man who bred hate, bred racism … with his guns and his Panthers (at the trial) in South Bend. It seemed to me that he wasn’t sorry for what his son did. He was only sorry that he got caught.”