Star Tribune
Somali parents ramp up efforts to prevent tragedies following 4-year-old boy’s drowning
Tears flowed at the makeshift memorial along Minnehaha Creek where a 4-year-old boy with autism drowned last week, but talk among mourners at the site near his mother’s home in Hopkins also turned to what might be done to prevent similar tragedies in the future.
Local groups dedicated to providing resources for Somali families of children with autism have since picked up the discussion. Protecting young children with extra vulnerabilities can be a challenge even without the language and cultural barriers faced by immigrant families.
“The community needs to come together and understand that this is a serious problem when it comes to not only raising a child with autism but also that it’s a serious safety issue,” said Mahdi Warsama, CEO of the Somali Parents Autism Network (SPAN), which provides resources and support for Somali families with autistic children.
Waeys Ali Mohamed was last seen the morning of June 9, leaving the apartment building in Hopkins where his family lived. His body was found the next morning by a volunteer searcher about 500 yards downstream from the apartment, following an extensive search effort. Hopkins police called it a tragic accident.
Warsama said a simple step would be to increase the prevalence of interior door locks with number combinations, which could prevent a child from wandering away from home. But he said apartment complex managers often resist those modifications. In some cases, he said, his organization has assisted Somali families facing eviction for installing a lock.
“The families have to know that they have a right to ask for a special accommodation if they have a child with autism,” said Warsama, who has a child with autism.
The Chorus apartments, where the boy lived, did not return calls seeking comment.
Children with autism are four times more likely to wander away from home, and are 160 times more likely to drown than children without the disorder, according to the nationwide nonprofit Autism Society.
Warsama said the drowning has him wanting to develop a training course specifically to teach water safety. Dr. Linda Quan, a Seattle-based physician who has studied drowning and how to prevent it for 40 years, said there has been “enormous interest” nationwide in teaching children with autism how to swim.
“We know it’s hard to teach children with autism how to swim, but it can be done,” Quan said. “There are more and more studies that they can obtain swim skills.”
Quan emphasized that even with swimming or water safety knowledge, “that still cannot be relied upon to protect them.”
Aside from direct prevention methods, Warsama and other nonprofits and professors said the incident highlights a broader need for more culturally-appropriate services for Somalian parents of children with autism, whom they said often face additional barriers to resources.
Amy Hewitt, the director of the Institute on Community Integration at the University of Minnesota, said there’s an overall dearth of well-trained professionals for Somali children “and every other child from a diverse racial, ethnic or linguistic background.”
“The importance of working with people who can communicate with you in your preferred language, who understand your cultural background, where trusting relationships can be built is critical,” Hewitt said. “We’re just not there yet.”
Warsama’s nonprofit, SPAN, is one of the groups trying to improve the services available for Somali families. The group provides “Somali culture 101″ trainings, in which workers visit county service providers, schools and health facilities to educate on the needs and accommodations a Somali client might have.
Some of the challenge is a stigma around autism that exists within the Somali community, according to SPAN chairman Abdulkadir Hassan.
“This stigma causes Somali parents to hide their children, and it becomes very hard for schools and other professionals who provide services to figure out who is qualified for the services,” Hassan said during an interview at SPAN’s offices in Sabathani Community Center.
In 2015, a study released by Hewitt and others found that Somali children with autism were more likely to have an intellectual disability than non-Somalis. But she said those trends are no longer applicable after studying additional data collected since the 2015 report.
“We don’t have good enough data to know whether prevalence rates in the Somali community are higher or not, but we know that many children in the Somali community live with autism,” Hewitt said.
SPAN is one of four nonprofits included in a joint statement Friday that mourned Waeys’ death and vowed to collaborate on preventing additional drownings.
“Waeys is not the first autistic child that has been lost to elopement, in water especially, but we desperately wish for him to be the last,” said Ellie Wilson, executive director of the Autism Society of Minnesota.
She emphasized that accidental deaths like Waeys’ happen due to a “chain of inequities” ranging from family isolation and community stigma, to lack of culturally responsive disability services, to renter policies.
“We hope that more stakeholders understand the nuanced connection between these barriers and seek to confront them with a multifaceted prevention response,” she said.
Here are some links to Minnesota nonprofits that provide services to families with autism:
Star Tribune
A clever wolf repeatedly snuck into a Minnesota ranch. Biologists with the Voyageurs Wolf Project figured out its MO.
Johnson’s ranch sits in the densest part of the state’s wolf territory, and is surrounded on all sides by five active packs south of Voyageurs National Park. At 1,600 acres with 750 head of cattle, it’s not just the biggest ranch in wolf territory, but one of the trickiest terrains. It’s hilly, and has marshy land on one of its borders. Ninemile Creek and the Black Duck River run through it.
If a fence can keep wolves out here, Gable said, it can keep them out pretty much anywhere.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has been trying out similar fences over the last four years. The fences built have been much smaller — enclosing 40 acres or less. They work more as pens, where cows can give birth in peace and then the calves can rotate out when they’re older and less vulnerable. The state reports no wolves have made it inside the six fences that have been installed.
Fences are no small investment, however. Johnson’s 7.5-mile fence cost roughly $70,000 in materials, plus hundreds of man-hours provided by Gable, his research partner, Austin Homkes, Johnson and the USDA to install it. If they had to contract out the installation work, the fence would have cost several hundred thousand, Gable said.
Rancher Wes Johnson drives his truck past some of his red angus cattle. (Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
But shooting problem wolves is expensive, too.
Every spring Johnson would lose a handful of calves to wolves soon after they were born. The public has to pay to reimburse ranchers for any wolf-killed livestock, and it pays federal trappers to hunt problem wolves. In Johnson’s case, the trappers were called in after each incident to kill up to a dozen wolves in the area.
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter was consensual, according to a statement from his lawyer Saturday and other documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Hegseth’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, said that Hegseth was “visibly intoxicated” at the time of the incident, and maintained that police who were contacted a few days after the encounter by the woman concluded “the Complainant had been the aggressor in the encounter.” Police have not confirmed that assertion.
Hegseth agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the woman because he feared that revelation of the matter “would result in his immediate termination from Fox,” where he works as a host, the statement said.
The statement came after a detailed memo was sent to the Trump transition team this week by a woman who said she is a friend of the accuser. The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, alleged he raped the then-30-year-old conservative group staffer in his room after drinking at a hotel bar. The person who sent the memo to the transition team did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
The accuser, whose identity has not been made public, filed a complaint with the police alleging she was sexually assaulted days after the Oct. 7, 2017 encounter in Monterey, California, but the local district attorney did not bring charges. Police confirmed that they investigated the incident. After she threatened litigation in 2020, Hegseth made the payment and she signed the nondisclosure agreement, his attorney said.
The detailed, four-page memo about the incident has set off debate among senior Trump transition officials, but so far Trump has stood behind Hegseth. Spokesman Steven Cheung earlier this week said: “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”
The documents from Hegseth’s attorney and the memo to the transition team from someone who said she is a friend of the woman and was “present and involved” in the case tell drastically different stories about what happened seven years ago at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa – although both sides agree that Hegseth had a sexual encounter with a woman there.
Hegseth, whose second wife had filed for divorce the previous month, had traveled to Monterey to speak to a California Federation of Republican Women conference. Afterward, according to his lawyer, he went to the hotel bar with a group of attendees.
The Gophers women’s hockey team contained longtime WCHA rival Minnesota Duluth, winning 3-2 Saturday afternoon to sweep a series at Amsoil Arena. The No. 3 Gophers haven’t lost to the No. 4 Bulldogs since the NCAA regional final in mid-March 2022.
Peyton Hemp, Gracie Graham and Emma Connor scored for the Gophers (10-3-1, 6-3-1 WCHA), with Abbey Murphy getting two assists. UMD’s Kamdyn Davis and Nina Jobst-Smith scored for the Bulldogs (6-55-1, 5-4-1 WCHA).
Gophers freshman goalie Hannah Clark had 31 saves; UMD’s Eve Gascon had 35.
UMD freshman defender Davis scored her first career goal off a backhanded pass from sophomore winger Grace Sadura. Davis skated in from Clark’s left side and lofted it to the right corner in the first five minutes of the opening period. Freshman defender Graham whipped the puck past Gascon midway through the period to tie the game. Peyton Hemp scored a power-play goal in the final two minutes of the first period, poking the puck in low on a rebound of a shot by Nelli Laitinen. The Gophers closed the period with a 2-1 advantage.
UMD’s Sadura left the game near the end of the second period after taking a major misconduct penalty for making contact with an opponent’s head. The Bulldogs were able to kill the penalty to close the period.
Gophers junior winger Connor scored midway through the final period, putting a rebound past Gascon. The Bulldogs had a 5-3 power-play advantage when Jobst-Smith sent the puck sailing high past Clark in the final five minutes of play. UMD pulled Gascon in the final minute but wasn’t able to tie the game.
The Gophers eased past the Bulldogs 4-1 in Friday’s opener, helped by two goals by Ella Huber, one shorthanded, the other an empty-netter, and two assists by Natalie Mlynkova. UMD’s Gascon had 48 saves, tying a personal best.
The Gophers host No. 8 St. Cloud State for a home-and-home series next weekend. The Bulldogs host unranked Bemidji State.
