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The fire wasn't the end of street justice for Haggag Mohsin. Two days after the shooting, he says, he was jumped by several African-American men in the holding cell while he was in custody. They attempted to stab him in the face with a pencil, and then broke his nose.
Hatch snorts while recalling that jumping from a spartan interview room at the San Francisco County Jail, where she's currently in custody for violating her probation on a previous drug conviction. "I don't know how [the news] got in here," she says. "I think people went racial with it. You're a — we call them A-rabs — you don't get to just do that." Still, she insists she's no racist: "Some of 'em are cool, some of them stay to themselves."
Hatch says Smith, now 43, is a distant cousin she'd known since she was a child (although at trial, Smith said the women were not related). Now 24, Hatch speaks openly about her past, however unflattering. Growing up in the projects along Cesar Chavez, she dropped out of high school some time after having a baby at age 15 and became a career shoplifter — known as a "booster" in street lingo. She'd steal merchandise all over the Bay Area and later sell it at a reduced price, or take "orders" to steal specific items. Court records show she was most recently caught in January at Macy's for taking a Sean John shirt she says was for a job interview later that day. So Hatch understands why people might doubt her when she says she and Smith weren't robbing Pop Ya Collar. But she insists that, at the time, the two women were trying to go legit and had landed jobs at a Tenderloin hotel.
Although Hatch testified at the preliminary hearing, the DA said she couldn't find Hatch to serve her with a subpoena to testify during the trial. It seems that may have been a good thing for the prosecution. Hatch says the women had a falling-out after the shooting, and now alleges that Smith is exaggerating her injury to get a bigger payout in her personal injury lawsuit against Mohsin, whose store has a $1 million insurance policy. Hatch says that Smith would put on her neck brace only when she was going to visit her caseworker at the DA's office, who had helped her apply for state money for victims of violent crime. "She didn't need that fuckin' neck brace," Hatch says. "As soon as she got home she'd take it off. She'd be like, 'Girl, this has got me sweatin' all day.'"
Hatch says now she feels "used" to testify so Smith can win a handsome sum in her civil suit. "I didn't know this situation was gonna turn into evil. Who doesn't want 'justice'?" Hatch said, making air quotes with her fingers. "But she's not looking at it as justice. She's looking at it to get paid."
Mike Cohen, the attorney representing Smith in the civil suit pending in Alameda County Superior Court, disagrees. A guilty verdict, he said, might actually make it harder to win a claim, because it would show the shooting was an intentional act by Mohsin — and thus may not be covered by the store's insurance policy. "Debbie basically took the position that she's going to put it in God's hands because all she's interested in is the truth," he says. "She's going to say what happened and let the criminal process take its course, and if it makes it harder for us on the civil side, she doesn't care."
Although her version questioned Smith's motives, Hatch's account of the day Mohsin shot Smith is still damning and backs up the central point of the prosecution's case: He pursued the women out of the store and fired into a car he knew people were sitting in. Hatch says she tried on pants but didn't buy them; she then left the store and walked to Smith's car around the corner on Oakdale. Hatch says Mohsin crossed the street and tapped on the car's driver's-side window. Smith slammed on the accelerator, they heard the gunshot, and then Smith screamed she'd been hit. "He could have killed her," Hatch says. "He could have killed me. I just want him to get what he deserves."
A few weeks ago in a modern courtroom six floors above Civic Center Plaza and seemingly a world away from the scorched Pop Ya Collar, a prosecutor who'd never lost a firearm case in her four years at the office stacked up the evidence against Haggag Mohsin for the jury.
Assistant District Attorney Suzy Loftus played the recording of a police investigator interrogating Mohsin at Bayview Station the day of the shooting. Mohsin, sounding small and scared, said he shot at the car, aiming for the "license plate or the taillight." Loftus called on the chief medical examiner to look at Smith's records and testify that the bullet's trajectory was consistent with the position of a woman hunched over in her seat when shot from behind and to the left, which would corroborate Smith's version of events as much as Mohsin's.
Yet much of the prosecution's case depended on how much the jury would believe Smith. She entered the courtroom like a woman on the verge of a panic attack, lumbering to her seat and heaving for breath as if she had just run to the courthouse. She wore no neck brace, but to look at an aerial map of Third Street she turned her entire torso instead of merely turning her head. (Medical records show she reports numbness, tingling, and pain in her neck and shoulders since the shooting.) During pauses, she scanned the room as if she were searching for a sympathetic face.
