A girl fled her war-torn homeland, but found more trauma in San Francisco
By Heather Knight
The morning began like most in the Saleh family’s tiny studio six floors above Turk and Hyde streets in the Tenderloin. The four children rose from their mats on the floor as their parents emerged from the closet where they share a small mattress.
Abu Bakr Saleh, the father and sole earner in the family of refugees who fled the war in Yemen, rushed to begin a 16-hour double shift at a grocery store and a KFC. His wife, Sumaya Albadani, began an isolating day of cooking, cleaning and waiting for the others to return.
The kids — Ahmed, 16, Asma, 15, Raghad, 12, and Maya, 10 — rode a rickety elevator down to one of the city’s most distressed blocks, before fanning out to their four schools.
But on Sept. 29, 2021, Raghad didn’t reach hers.
The sixth-grader at Francisco Middle School in North Beach — who had suffered a major trauma the year before, when an immigration fiasco forced her family to leave her with strangers in Egypt — lingered on the 400 block of Larkin Street while Ahmed ran into a shop to do an errand.
Just then, a woman in a wheelchair approached, yelling incoherently and spouting Islamophobic statements about the girl’s hijab, according to the girl and police. Raghad, still learning English, only caught portions of the diatribe, but heard three words very clearly: “Are you scared?”
“After that, she came close to me, and she hit me,” the girl told me a few months later. “She punched me in the head. I felt dizzy after that. I couldn’t believe it.”
Ahmed witnessed the attack and rushed to help. A security guard called 911. Police responded and arrested the woman on suspicion of committing assault, child endangerment and a hate crime. After getting checked out by paramedics, Raghad spent the day at home.
She hasn’t been the same since, her family said. She spends long hours playing games on her phone and watching YouTube videos. She’s listless. She cries more. She’s still fearful, saying she’s seen the woman several times since the attack despite a protective order to stay away.
The attack was shocking, but only to a degree, in a neighborhood with one of the city’s highest assault rates. And it would ripple outward: In November, the episode would become one focus of a letter that Tenderloin families delivered to Mayor London Breed, pleading for help.
“We are immigrants and refugees. We are children and mothers and fathers,” began the letter, penned by staff at the Tenderloin Community Benefit District and signed by 400 neighbors. “We are the Tenderloin, and you have failed us.”
The Salehs had one wish: to escape their $2,050-a-month studio for a bigger apartment in a safer neighborhood. More broadly, they sought the American dream in a city that proclaims itself a refuge.
By Heather Knight
The morning began like most in the Saleh family’s tiny studio six floors above Turk and Hyde streets in the Tenderloin. The four children rose from their mats on the floor as their parents emerged from the closet where they share a small mattress.
Abu Bakr Saleh, the father and sole earner in the family of refugees who fled the war in Yemen, rushed to begin a 16-hour double shift at a grocery store and a KFC. His wife, Sumaya Albadani, began an isolating day of cooking, cleaning and waiting for the others to return.
The kids — Ahmed, 16, Asma, 15, Raghad, 12, and Maya, 10 — rode a rickety elevator down to one of the city’s most distressed blocks, before fanning out to their four schools.
But on Sept. 29, 2021, Raghad didn’t reach hers.
The sixth-grader at Francisco Middle School in North Beach — who had suffered a major trauma the year before, when an immigration fiasco forced her family to leave her with strangers in Egypt — lingered on the 400 block of Larkin Street while Ahmed ran into a shop to do an errand.
Just then, a woman in a wheelchair approached, yelling incoherently and spouting Islamophobic statements about the girl’s hijab, according to the girl and police. Raghad, still learning English, only caught portions of the diatribe, but heard three words very clearly: “Are you scared?”
“After that, she came close to me, and she hit me,” the girl told me a few months later. “She punched me in the head. I felt dizzy after that. I couldn’t believe it.”
Ahmed witnessed the attack and rushed to help. A security guard called 911. Police responded and arrested the woman on suspicion of committing assault, child endangerment and a hate crime. After getting checked out by paramedics, Raghad spent the day at home.
She hasn’t been the same since, her family said. She spends long hours playing games on her phone and watching YouTube videos. She’s listless. She cries more. She’s still fearful, saying she’s seen the woman several times since the attack despite a protective order to stay away.
The attack was shocking, but only to a degree, in a neighborhood with one of the city’s highest assault rates. And it would ripple outward: In November, the episode would become one focus of a letter that Tenderloin families delivered to Mayor London Breed, pleading for help.
“We are immigrants and refugees. We are children and mothers and fathers,” began the letter, penned by staff at the Tenderloin Community Benefit District and signed by 400 neighbors. “We are the Tenderloin, and you have failed us.”
The Salehs had one wish: to escape their $2,050-a-month studio for a bigger apartment in a safer neighborhood. More broadly, they sought the American dream in a city that proclaims itself a refuge.
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27 imagesThe Death of Darrius Stewart by Yalonda M. James The Commercial Appeal “I can’t breathe” were a few of Darrius Stewart’s last words during a fatal encounter with Memphis police officer Connor Schilling on July 17 on church grounds. I. Can’t. Breathe. A year earlier to the day, Eric Garner uttered those exact words through a chokehold while being arrested by officers from the New York Police Department. Their deaths have added fuel to a new civil rights movement called Black Lives Matter. “Too often young black lives are being sacrificed by the police of this nation,” Tami Sawyer, a Memphis activist, said at Stewart’s funeral in August. “People want you to say ‘All Lives Matter’ and erase the fact that we are ignored in this country. ... If we can’t say ‘Black Lives Matter,’ who can?” Sawyer asked. As of Dec. 17, 944 people have been shot and killed by police, according to The Washington Post. Nineteen of those people were from Tennessee. Nationally, 32 of them were unarmed and black, including Stewart, who was shot by Schilling as they fought after a traffic stop. “We can’t have this unchecked genocide continue without the protections of law,” said Keith Norman, pastor at First Baptist-Broad and president of the NAACP Memphis Branch. “I have two young African-American sons and daughters, two sons and two daughters, and I don’t want this to occur in my own family, but when it occurs in any family it occurs in my family.” Since the recent shooting deaths across the country of Stewart, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Laquon McDonald, Samuel DuBose, and many others — tensions are high in the black community. In the aftermath of Stewart’s fatal shooting, Stewart’s family and friends, activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and local pastors have held numerous protests and vigils calling for justice and expressing dissatisfaction with local authority. “People are hurting out here,” Rev. Earle Fisher said during a vigil a week after Stewart’s death. “He didn’t have to die. ... Don’t let next week come around and you forgot who Darrius Stewart is. Don’t let next month come around and you forgot who Darrius Stewart is.” -
25 imagesThe story of Hyde Park is the story of a multitude of inner-city neighborhoods hollowed out as Memphis’ population moved outward, into the city’s outer reaches, to the suburbs and beyond, fleeing crime and higher taxes, pursuing jobs and higher-performing schools. -
15 imagesCypress Gardens is a Section 8 apartment complex in North Memphis, Tennessee. The complex, located at 1205 Springdale St. in the Hyde Park neighborhood, receives federal subsidies every year, including $160,954 last year from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Despite all that funding, tenants are living in poor conditions, and many of the women and children have respiratory problems such as asthma and bronchitis, which are caused or worsen by mold. Many residents also complain that the management company charges them for repair work. -
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