“One Friday evening last May, Adly Ohalley and his wife, Worood Abumayaleh, went to pick up their teenage son at a friend’s house in Brooklyn Park, north of downtown Minneapolis,” mpr.org reports. “He drove; she sat in the passenger seat, wearing a cream-colored headscarf. As they had done many nights before, they parked in front of the house and waited for their boy to come out.” Enter a self-described soccer mom . . .
“And suddenly a lady came with a rifle,” Abumayaleh said. “Knocking very very hard. And she said, ‘Open the window or I’ll kill you. Open the window.’ And I was scared, I couldn’t even call 911 or do anything. I just froze, my brain froze … [I] just said, ‘Maybe she’s going to kill us now.'”
Ohalley said he opened his wife’s window.
“She asked us, ‘What are you doing here?’ I told her that we are picking up our son from this house. She said, ‘What house?’ I said, ‘This house,'” Ohalley told her.
But the woman didn’t believe them. “So she came around with her rifle, point[ed] it at me, and said, ‘Get out of the car, and move in front of me to the house to prove that your son’s in there,'” Ohalley said. “So she put the gun on my back.”
Ohalley paused and choked up, remembering the terror he felt at the time.
“By the time we got halfway to the garage, my son came out, so I told my son not to do any acts, because she has a rifle,” said Ohalley.
Hennepin County court documents state that Nancy Kay Knoble put the weapon behind her back when the son came out. She asked the boy if he knew the adults. When he identified them as his parents, the 48-year-old woman apologized, according to the court documents, and told the family she was only carrying a pellet gun.
The cops were not impressed. After a discussion down at the station, Ms. Knoble pleaded guilty to making terroristic threats.
A few days ago, Hennepin County District Court Judge William Koch sentenced Ms. Knoble to 45 days in jail with eligibility for electronic monitoring after 15 days. During the subsequent three-year probation Judge Koch required Knoble to participate in a “cultural awareness program” to “learn more about the Islamic faith.” (And surrender her firearms.)
I can’t find any indication that Ms. Knoble’s decision to hold Adly Ohalley and Worood Abumayaleh at gunpoint was based solely on their apparent religious affiliation. Perhaps it was. Even so, would Ms. Knoble have received the same sentence if she’d interrupted a couple of hoodie-wearing black teenagers in a car? Not jail part, the “sensitivity training” bit.
I gotta say it: racial profiling may not be the most useful tool for security but it’s a useful tool, despite the PC backlash against it. Did a neighbor suspect the San Bernardino terrorists of nefarious activities and held back out of political correctness? Regardless of this case, is political correct policing putting us all at risk?