Livingston–A “just kill,” was how Ali Muhammad Brown described the June 25 murder by gunshot wound of a young man who happened to fit his required description and was conveniently stopped at an intersection. Brendan Tevlin, 19, of Livingston, a Seton Hall prep graduate, was on summer break after completing his freshman year at the University of Richmond in Virginia, when he stopped at a traffic light in West Orange on June 1 while heading to his home on Northfield Avenue.
According to court papers, Brown, being held on $5 million bail, and two alleged accomplices, Jeremy Villagran, 19, and Eric Williams, 18, faces murder, robbery and weapons charges in Tevlin’s death. Brown said he carried out the murder against an adult male not in the company of women, children or elderly persons, as Sharia law prescribed. Brown said it was an act of vengeance to compensate for U.S. military killings in the Middle East.
Tevlin, a U.S. student never participated in any military action. While American media reports the three beheadings and hundreds of murders of other innocents by ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations, according to islamweb, “It is Islamically unlawful to murder anyone who is innocent of any crime.” According to the website, if any Muslim kills an innocent person, that Muslim has committed a grave sin, and the action cannot be claimed to have been committed “in the name of Islam.”
JLBC questioned the Office of the Attorney General of NJ regarding the status of this attack as a hate crime, but the questions went unanswered as of this writing. A pamphlet released by that office, “Guide to Identifying & Understanding Bias Crime,” says tight scrutiny is given in determining such a charge.
The choice of victim must because of race, color, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, or ethnicity. In New Jersey the people most often the targets of bias or hate crimes are either Black, Jewish, members of the gay and lesbian community, immigrants and other ethnic groups, none of which can be seen to have described Tevlin. Types of bias/hate crimes include harassment, assault, terroristic threats, arson, criminal mischief and homicide. Perpetrators are usually members of organized hate groups, people between the ages of 12 and 21, or any individual if their actions fall within the elements of the crime. If an offense is labeled as a bias or hate crime, penalties become ‘enhanced,’ generally by the determination in the level of severity of the crime and the number of years to be incarcerated.
How the crime is labeled is up to the courts. Brown, a U.S. citizen and a self-proclaimed Jihadist, is also charged in the murders of three young men in Seattle, Washington. Prosecutors filed aggravated murder charges against him for the death of Leroy Henderson, 30 in Skyway, south of Seattle who was outdoors late at night walking, as well as Ahmed Said and Dwone Anderson-Young who were shot to death as they left a nightclub. Brown was also wanted for the alleged armed robbery of a Point Pleasant coffee shop, an attempted a car-jacking in mid-July and failing to register as a sex offender for crimes against a 6-year-old girl. He was prosecuted federally after an FBI probe into a radical group suspected of supporting jihadists overseas.
“The investigation in King County and New Jersey reveals that this defendant is responsible for a series of murders, none of which appear to be provoked, and all of which show an extreme level of violence,” King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said. “The defendant was on a bloody crusade, executing four innocent men–with the same murder weapon, over the course of approximately two months, and all under the common and single scheme of exacting ‘vengeance’ against the U.S, government for its foreign policies,” read the court documents.
King County Sheriff’s Detective John Pavlovich said that in a probable cause affidavit filed in Seattle, Brown described himself to detectives after his New Jersey arrest as a strict Muslim who had become angry with what he described as the U.S. government’s role in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan that he said had led to the death of innocent civilians and children.
According to the Seattle Times, Brown served federal prison time for conspiracy to commit bank fraud in connection with a plot to defraud several banks between January 2002 and November 2004. According to documents filed in U.S. District Court, Brown and three other men defrauded U.S. Bank, Bank of America, Key Bank, Washington Mutual, Wells Fargo and Boeing Employees Credit Union by depositing counterfeit and fake checks and then withdrawing the funds before the checks were returned. According to the Seattlepi.com Brown is facing capital charges in Seattle, either life imprisonment or the death penalty.
Much has been made of the media’s apparent disinterest in Brown’s alleged crime spree of murder and mayhem, as well as the idea that “jihad” already exists in the U.S. According to The Islamic Supreme Council of America, The Arabic word “jihad” is often translated as “holy war,” but in a purely linguistic sense, the word “jihad” means struggling or striving. The Arabic word for war is: “al-harb.” The Quran has strict rules concerning the use of violence as jihad yet that does not seem to have stopped self-proclaimed jihadists from what they have called Jihad.
According to the New York Times, in addition to 9/11 and the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, James Cromite, Onta Williams, David Williams IV and Laguerra Payen were sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of an attempted acts of terrorism case based on comments to an informer and to others that Cromite wanted to bomb “a cop car,” “hit the bridge” to New Jersey, “get a synagogue” and join a Pakistani terrorist organization and die like a martyr. The group placed what they believed to be real bombs around two synagogues in Riverdale, NY and also planned to shoot Stinger missiles at military planes at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, NY.
Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev set off two pressure cooker bombs during the Boston Marathon in April of 2013, killing three people and injuring an estimated 264 others. Dzkokhar alleged they were motivated by extremist Islamist beliefs and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rahatul Ashikim Khan of Bangladesh, naturalized U.S. citizen and Michael Todd Wolfe of Houston, Texas were arrested for terror related offenses when, according to ABC News, federal agents said they planned to travel halfway around the world to engage in violent jihad.
Frontpage Magazine reported that Musab Mohamed Masmari of Seattle was convicted on July 31 and sentenced to ten years in prison for pouring gasoline onto a stairway in a gay nightclub on New Year’s Eve because, he thought homosexuals should be exterminated according to Sharia (Islamic) law. Sami Osmakac of Tampa was convicted of plotting to bomb a bar and then blow himself up in martyrdom in another area of the city. Osmakac is reported to have said of non-Muslims: “We will go after every one of them, their kindergartens, their shopping centers, their nightclubs, their police stations, their courthouses and everything until we have an Islamic state the whole world.”
Ahmed Abassi, the New York Post reported, allegedly wanted to derail a New York to Toronto Amtrak train and hatch “a plot to release bacteria in the air or water to kill up to 100,000 people.” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said he plotted to “commit acts of terror and develop a network of terrorists here,” in the U.S. And according to the Associated Press, Mufid Elfgeeh, of Rochester, NY allegedly bought two handguns and silencers as part of a plan to kill members of the U.S. armed forces returning from war as well as Shiite Muslims in western New York–not to mention countless other incidents where perpetrators claim fealty to extreme Islam.
All the perpetrators are being treated as murderers, because at the end of the day, murder is murder.
By Anne Phyllis Pinzow
