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The arson and threats "don't mean I'm gonna leave my business and run away, because that's what they think they're gonna do," Adnan says. "I'm not givin' up."
After the shooting, rumors of the Arab shopkeeper who shot a black woman in the back spread like wildfire down Third Street. The uninsured African-American landlord of Pop Ya Collar, Franklin Bell, claims he pleaded with a local man, Ralph Talley, to spare his building and burn the Mohsins' liquor store on the corner instead. But in the early hours of the morning of Oct. 12, Talley chucked a lit gasoline-filled Snapple bottle through the shop's window, the flames spreading to burn more than $100,000 worth of merchandise. Later that day on the Channel 5 news, he played dumb for the cameras: "This stuff like that ain't never gonna be over. Whoever done this here, that was small." Talley was later convicted of arson and handed a three-year prison sentence.
Haggag's brothers continue to show up for work each day. Their grandparents had immigrated from Yemen in the 1930s; their uncle was the first in the family to open a store in the Bay Area, where, after decades working in the Central Valley fields, Yemeni immigrants found a niche in liquor and small grocery stores in the '60s and '70s. Yemenis are now so numerous that they have joined with other Arabs and South Asians to form the San Francisco–based Arab Grocers Association, representing some 400 stores in the Bay Area. But it's a job that puts them on the frontlines of urban violence. The Yemeni Consulate has collected reward money in local mosques to catch suspects in multiple murders of liquor store employees.
The brothers found the Third Street location in 2002 after the family's Oakland store was bought out by the school district. During the negotiation process to buy the store, an Arab worker at the liquor store directly across the street was shot dead. The brothers attempted to get out of the sale, but it was too late.
Adnan says you'd be a fool to not have a gun to defend yourself. After all, his family is haunted by violent incidents that happened while working in retail outlets in poor neighborhoods. In 2005, Adnan says, his uncle owned the store in Oakland that was invaded by Yusuf Bey IV and his suit-and-bow-tied followers from Your Black Muslim Bakery, who demanded he stopped selling liquor to African-Americans and smashed the glass doors of the store's refrigerators. Robbers shot dead a childhood friend of Haggag's who worked at a North Richmond convenience store; Adnan says another uncle was killed after a hold-up in his New York store. In high school, Haggag wrestled an Uzi out of the hands of a guy who held him up at a Walgreens cash register in Berkeley.
"Every day, it's always in your mind," Adnan says. "You come in the store, in a split second, anything can happen."
Of course, business is not all antagonistic. Some of the Arab shop owners who've grown up in the neighborhood maintain a friendly relationship with the community, calling customers by name and even donating food and drinks to local charities. Customers know Adeeb as "Mike" and Adnan as "Sam," and will kid him that "Sam don't eat ham." The store tapes photos of the locals' kids near the cash register alongside their own family photos.
Having learned English in a black neighborhood and in predominantly African-American schools, the older brothers speak with Ebonics-tinged grammar and Middle Eastern accents (they were all born in Yemen, but emigrated young). In the style of the locals, Adnan refers to himself as an "A-rab." They sell liquor and pork skins, but don't consume either because of their Muslim faith; the brothers often bow for their daily prayers in the back storeroom. Adnan despises hip-hop — "It's all about how you want to kill a person, or how you want to sleep with this woman" — and says he has never been to a club in his life, preferring to barbecue kebabs at picnics with his extended family on the weekends.
But the shooting proved that the Mohsins couldn't completely separate themselves from the pitfalls of the hood where they did business. Going to jail "is normal" to some troublemakers in the Bayview, "because they've been in trouble, they go to jail it don't matter, they stay out it don't matter," Adnan says. "But to us, it's a big thing, you know?" He describes Haggag, a married father, as the "mellow and funniest brother," the one who would laugh off disagreements. Haggag would get to the mosque to pray with their elderly father at 5 a.m. and was focused on his dream of becoming an Oakland cop — specifically, a homicide investigator. Haggag was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army in 2006, where he had trained for several months to serve as an Arabic translator (he says a recruiter claimed it would help him advance his police career) when he refused to deploy to Iraq or Guantanamo Bay on antiwar grounds. "I know if my brother have the chance not to shoot, he would not do it," Adnan says.
Yet some folks still have it in for Haggag. Adnan says he got threatening phone calls to his cellphone for two years after the shooting: If he gets out of that case, we're gonna look for him. If he goes to jail, we got somebody waiting for him. Adnan would just hang up.
The morning after the shooting, Jamie Hatch woke up in a room at San Francisco General Hospital as the TV news mentioned a story about five suspected shoplifters. She had spent the night beside Smith, who was recovering from the shooting in which bullet fragments fractured a vertebra in her neck and lodged next to her carotid artery, just short of a potentially fatal injury. The TV news announced that Pop Ya Collar had been torched, and Hatch says she rejoiced. "I was like, 'Yeah! That's what the fuck he get. He doesn't just get to go around shootin' people.'" She recalls Smith was less energetic: "She was just like, 'Oh my God, who did this?' Debbie was worried they'd think we had something to do with it."
