EVERETT — An Everett man who as a child witnessed his brother’s fatal shooting in war-torn Iraq was sentenced to more than 23 years in prison Tuesday for a robbery that ended in murder.
Ali M. Ramadhan, 19, said nothing during his sentencing hearing before Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Bruce Weiss.
He pleaded guilty in April to shooting Jeffery Wehl during a Jan. 21 robbery at the man’s W. Casino Road apartment. Wehl, 57, lingered for three days after his neighbor found him bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head.
Ramadhan, who calls himself “Ali Baghdad,” admitted he intended to rob Wehl. His accomplice, Kyelee Milner, then 17, was initially charged with murder but wound up pleading guilty to robbery and was sentenced to three years in prison because there was scant evidence she knew Ramadhan intended to shoot.
Ramadhan faced a mandatory minimum 20 years behind bars. As his sentencing approached, he demanded a new attorney and appeared to be considering withdrawing his plea.
His previous lawyer, public defender Natalie Tarantino, had Ramadhan examined by April Gerlock, a board certified adult psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner with more than 30 years experience.
Gerlock said there’s evidence Ramadhan has been living with depression and severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder linked to his experiences growing up in Baghdad.
“He was very young when he was exposed to the death, dying and the atrocities of war,” Gerlock wrote. “He was only 11 years old when his brother, Omar, was shot to death in front of him and his brother, Mohamed, and mother were severely wounded.”
The shootings apparently were linked to suspicions about Ramadhan’s father, who was working to provide security for Western journalists, Gerlock’s report said. Those connections later were helpful to the family in gaining asylum in the U.S., but Ramadhan, then 14, struggled.
Ramadhan ignored his family’s pleas that he seek help for problems with insomnia, nightmares, flashbacks and anger, Gerlock reported. He dropped out of school within a couple of years of arriving here and began turning to drugs and alcohol.
At the time of his arrest, he was using heroin and had turned to crime to pay for the drugs.
Ramadhan claimed he had no plan to kill Wehl. He said his codefendant, Milner, actually brought the gun, and that he pulled the trigger out of fear.
Weiss said it was clear that Ramadhan had a horrible childhood and he has no doubt that he is living with PTSD. But he didn’t believe the shooting was spontaneous. Police found witnesses who said the defendant bragged about planning the attack.
Earlier, the judge heard from Wehl’s sisters. They talked about how their brother cared for their aging parents until their mother’s death just months before he was killed. He’d only been living on his own for a short time, they said, and he was struggling.
They spoke of the shock of being told that somebody had shot their brother.
The pain will be with them the rest of their lives, they told the judge.
Scott North: 425-339-3431; north@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @snorthnews
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