Is This Man a Terrorist? (Pittsburgh Pulp Magazine Cover Story)

Is This Man a Terrorist?

Beaten, drugged and jailed: the strange story of Getu Berhanu Tewolde

By Jonathan Barnes
Photos by Shawn Brackbill

"Freaks!" yelled some passersby in Ozzy Osbourne t-shirts, hanging out the windows of their car and gawking as they drove by in rush-hour traffic. Cars screeched and halted, spewing out fumes that simmered in the humidity. Pedestrians walked around and at times walked through the peaceful protest of about two dozen people, and at least one passerby seemed angry that the collection of clerics, labor leaders, African-Americans and other activists had the temerity to assemble.

A slight breeze didn't take the edge off the protest, and maybe it was the heat that made the authorities so antsy. The group had been assembling across the street from the Greyhound bus station for 10 minutes when Vista Hotel security guards approached them.

Asking the organizers what was going on, the guards were given polite responses and went on their way. That left the few dozen activists to their protest of what they feel was ugly treatment by the Pittsburgh Police of Getu Berhanu Tewolde on his arrival in Pittsburgh on February 1. While traveling from Washington, D.C. to Denver, Getu, an Ethiopian immigrant, was arrested at the Greyhound station downtown. He was charged with making terroristic threats, causing and risking a catastrophe and aggravated and simple assault. This all occurred as a result of an incident during a layover in Pittsburgh.

Gathered downtown around the corner of 11th and Liberty on Thursday, June 13 during the dinner rush hour, activists from nine organizations and three churches toted signs reading "Free Getu," and chanting the same. By turns, they stood at a makeshift podium on the sidewalk to hammer the message of the grave wrong done to Getu.

"There's an old saying in labor -- that an injury to one is an injury to all," said John Lambiase, president of district six of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America. "Getu is different from the authorities, he is not different from the people. People of integrity do not beat people, do not drug people and abuse power."

As the speakers took their turns at the podium, the obvious theme of freedom of speech and the less obvious notions of freedom of space and movement emerged.

During what should have been a brief stop in Pittsburgh on February 1, Getu brushed against a Greyhound employee, Angela Street, while returning to his seat at the end of the stop. Street yelled accusations at him and the driver told Getu to get off the bus, according to Getu. Once he was inside the bus station, someone ordered Getu to sit. He refused to sit and tried to calm the crowd that was gathering around him. A police officer was called and asked Getu to sit, but because he didn't identify himself as an officer and Getu didn't see any badge, he refused. The policeman attacked and beat him, according to Getu, "disarming" Getu of the pen he was holding in his palm.

This story has been told several times, but in the beginning many just saw quick clips of Getu on television and no doubt many thought he must be guilty. He was yelling crazy, terrorist-sounding stuff on a Greyhound bus, reportedly things like "I'm Jesus" and "the Lord of Lords asked me [to choose] life or death" and "Americans are going to die." He'd had the crap kicked out of him by the police. He was a foreigner, and an African at that. If we got a dozen more like him, some people certainly thought, it'd be a good start.

But such knee-jerk reactions to this gray situation, where it seems there's plenty of blame to spread around, might be potentially as destructive as accepting carte blanche Getu's version of events.

At the busy corner last week, the rumble of traffic and windy conditions intermittently drowned out the unamplified voices of the speakers, and at times it seemed they were preaching to themselves, as protesters sometimes do.

Amnesty International Pittsburgh's Pamela Jordan strode to the podium and declared Getu had been denied due process and subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. "The conditions of Getu's confinement were egregious," she said. "Given only two hours a week to leave his cell. The [forced] medication, in combination with his solitary confinement" constitute cruel and unusual punishment, she said.

While many go to jail because of drugs, Getu was detained partly through the aid of mind-altering substances. Local authorities intentionally hopped him up on goofy pills, he said.

After his beating, Getu was placed on Disciplinary Housing Status at the Allegheny County Jail. He was tucked into the Mental Health pod under 24-hour solitary confinement and given eight pills a day without a behavioral clinic examination. He was allowed only two hours per week to leave his cell and shower and couldn't meet with a public defender because he was in solitary confinement, according to the Free Getu Coalition's web site, www.freegetu.org.

The incident that led to Getu's arrest might have been avoided if a few jingoistic idiots hadn't felt threatened by this 5-foot-2-inch, 125-pound stranger, others in the rally said. Mary Zimmerle, an organizer of the gathering and a member of the Zi activist organization, called Getu's arrest "an example of unrestrained hysteria. When we treat people who are different as the other, we dehumanize them. This leads to horrible consequences."

Just after she spoke the words, a third carload of hecklers passed by. This group was wearing dirty workmen's clothes, and they sounded like they'd been drinking. "You suck!" they yelled, flipping the protesters the bird.

Pittsburgh NAACP president Tim Stevens wasn't swayed by the catcalls. "Part of patriotism is a commitment to make our nation better than it is," he said. "It is trouble when someone comes to our city and their first experience is handcuffs. That is a sad commentary."

As if to underscore the point, a couple of Pittsburgh Police officers rolled up in a car and started asking questions. "Everybody has a right to assemble, as long as people can pass by on the street," one of the officers said, and the two left.

Stevens picked up where he'd stopped without missing a beat, jumping back into his solo riffs with a jazzman's flair. "Obviously we have to be about protecting our nation. But we also have to protect what we are as a nation. We don't have to be intimidated because a couple people sat on the cement."

Getu's trial was postponed until March 15 because he had to be cleared by the behavior clinic due to the felony charge. After getting pressure from the Free Getu Coalition and the ACLU, Getu received an exam and a lawyer visited within the week of his preliminary hearing. He passed the exam, moving his case forward and leading to his release on bail.

The "simple assault" charge was dropped at the March 15 preliminary hearing. The "causing and risking a catastrophe" charge was dropped as well, but a second "terroristic threat" charge was added before Getu's formal arraignment on May 20. A pre-trial conference was scheduled before deadline, on Wednesday, June 19, during which Judge John Zatolla was to set a trial date.

In the meantime, Getu is sorting out his feelings.

Meeting Getu gives you a sense of who was wronged. The soft-spoken man bears little resemblance to the images of him captured on the local "breaking news" television segments, his face puffy and his eye blackened from the beating. He said last week that he was amazed by the support of so many Pittsburghers. On the one hand, he said in soft, sometimes halting English, Pittsburgh has some aggressive people by which he clearly means the officers who arrested him. On the other, he added, "I didn't expect that Pittsburgh had such kind people" as his supporters.

He attributed the ordeal to the fact that he looks different from many Americans. "On the bus when the woman swore at me, it was because I looked different," he said. "I even said sorry."

Why charge Getu with making terroristic threats? Contacted after the demonstration, Allegheny County district attorney's office spokesman Mike Manko would not speculate on what led police to charge Getu, deferring questions to Zone 2 commander Bill Valenta. "It was a police investigation, you'd have to ask them," Manko said.

Getu's supporters have asked the district attorney to drop the rest of the charges against him, but Manko was guarded on the question. "I'm not going to discuss whatever strategy we have before a case goes to trial," he said.

And though the tide of media opinion has turned in favor of Getu, Pittsburgh Police officials tell a far different story of the incident that led to Getu's arrest.

"In essence, Mr. Tewolde was in a bus station and there was an incident between him and another person on the bus," said Zone 2 commander Bill Valenta. "At some point in time, Mr. Tewolde said everybody on the bus is going to die. The police officer arrived in full uniform and Mr. Tewolde proceeded to attack him with a pen. It was the behavior of Mr. Tewolde that dictated his response. He chose to act in an aggressive manner and attacked our officer."

The incident led police to evacuate the bus station building, to search the building for bombs and to call in the FBI's local counter-terrorism team, Valenta said. "We probably had the involvement of 50 to 60 personnel hours, all because of this guy becoming upset on the bus."

Valenta said he is bothered by the media attention that has depicted Getu as an innocent. He also takes umbrage at the suggestion that he would allow his officers to brutalize anyone. "We have written statements by 10 people who witnessed [Getu] going off. I oversee 120 police officers and ensure that they follow the law the right way. I'm very comfortable with what we did, from start to finish."

Given the fact that the Pittsburgh Police Department is under a federal consent decree instituted in 1997 due to police misconduct, it's easy to see why African-Americans in Pittsburgh might be wary of what police say. Many citizens aren't aware that the consent decree is in place, though it is meant to help them, and others don't believe it will work. Despite widespread resentment of the decree among police officers, and rampant mistrust of police officers among African-Americans, city officials are negotiating an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice that would end the consent decree this summer, though there is a backlog of cases that the city's Office of Municipal Investigations has not dealt with.

The office was created from the former Office of Professional Standards and was physically moved out of police headquarters to facilitate the filing of complaints. But given that the consent decree was forced upon the city due to a long history of local police abuses that resulted in the deaths of Johnny Gammage, Maneia Bey and others, many people have little patience for OMI's backlog of cases. To the injured party, justice delayed always seems to be justice denied.

Even if what Pittsburgh Police officials say about Getu's case is true, the fact that he was detained for several weeks and drugged in a prison mental health facility should be cause for alarm, even among those officers who say Getu was treated fairly. It seems axiomatic that people, native or non-native, shouldn't get lost, Josef K.-like, in a trial put off forever by inscrutable bureaucrats.

Comments:

 

Although this article is very thorough and discusses some of the history of Pittsburgh's police brutality problems, one important detail was left out: Getu was cleared by the FBI, but arrested anyway because of the “totality of the circumstances”, according to Commander Valenta (Fox 53 10 O'clock News broadcast on February 1).

Bus-ted (Pittsburgh City Paper Feature Story)

(available at https://web.archive.org/web/20021027115742/http://www.pghcitypaper.com/nz61902.html)

NEWS FEATURE

Bus-ted
Post-Sept. 11 paranoia may be what landed Getu Tewolde in jail for six weeks over a bus-station fracas

Getu Tewolde is able to laugh -- a little -- today about his six weeks in the Allegheny County Jail this past winter, where he says his mistreatment included being medicated against his will. On June 19, he will finally learn his trial date on charges of making terroristic threats, aggravated assault and resisting arrest, all for a February incident that was, he says, a simple misunderstanding -- one that, in post-Sept. 11 America, can get a legal Ethiopian immigrant with heavily accented, uncertain English imprisoned.

On the early morning of Feb. 1, Tewolde was traveling from his home in Washington, D.C., to surprise his uncle in Denver with a visit. His carry-on luggage was four pieces of pita bread and a pen. But during a 12-minute layover he bumped into the night manager at the Greyhound station Downtown and hasn’t been able to leave the city since.

Today, Tewolde has difficulty understanding some questions and answering others. He looks American, in a jean jacket, dress pants, brown shoes and a button-down shirt with two pens in the breast pocket -- much the same as he looked on the Greyhound bus. But listening to him, it is hard to imagine how well he was able to communicate during an incident that eventually drew a crowd, the police, the bomb squad and the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Tewolde’s shoulder and chest struck Greyhound employee Angela Street as he re-entered the bus during a layover, he explains. He is a small man -- 5’2”, about 130 pounds -- but the bus aisle was crowded. “I just asked her right away to forgive me,” Tewolde says. “She left the bus and right away the driver told me to get off the bus. I was very shocked why he said it.”

Asked to sit down inside the station, Tewolde refused; he felt he had done nothing to warrant ejection or suspicion. Confronted by a crowd, he protested and tried to explain himself. Witnesses told police Tewolde mentioned religious topics or threats against America. “I actually say something to calm them down,” he counters. He is not certain of his exact words. He might have spoken about religion, he allows; born to an Orthodox Christian family, Tewolde now believes in a Creator although not in a particular faith, but the subject interests him. He was trying, he says, to allude to the atmosphere of suspicion in America today.

Attempting to duplicate what he said at just past 7 a.m. that February morning in the bus station, he stumbles over words in English, though he is perfectly calm: “Why we are hating each other since there is life?” he says he told the crowd. “Why are we choosing the way of [these] days?” But there is still one phrase he says he told the crowd that is unmistakable: “Why are you hitting?”

When the first police officer, Brian Sellers, arrived, he had already received two calls about Tewolde -- the first, according to his police report, about a “disorderly male,” the second that “the male was getting more violent.” Street, he says, claimed Tewolde had pushed her “several times.” Sellers found Tewolde “irritated and yelling,” saying “that people were going to die.” The officer hip-tossed Tewolde to the ground after he refused to put his hands behind his back. Then, Sellers says, Tewolde pulled a pen from his jacket pocket and attempted to stab him. Sellers punched Tewolde several times in the head and face, handcuffed him and placed him in the police car.

Tewolde, for his part, says he did not recognize that Sellers was a police officer -- saw no badge, no belt with gun and handcuffs, and no hat; he never heard Sellers identify himself. “I was unconcentrating,” Tewolde says. “I[t] was a very short time” for an officer to have arrived, and Tewolde was surprised. He was trying to protect his pen, he adds, not wield it as a weapon. “That’s when I knew he was police,” he says, “when I was handcuffed.”

Even though the bomb squad determined the bus wasn’t in danger and the FBI’s terrorism task force ruled the threat from Tewolde “negligible,” he was on his way to jail.

ANOTHER THREAT” read the caption under the Fox 53 news video of a small, dark man being led into a police van on Feb. 1. Carnegie Mellon University engineering researcher Saleh Waziruddin was watching the news that night and remembers the image. Waziruddin, 24, of Shadyside, is a member of the CMU activist group Zi, which has tried to assist in several other local post-Sept. 11 arrests involving terrorism accusations. He contacted Tewolde in jail and formed the Free Getu Coalition of local groups working for his release (www.freegetu.org).

The coalition is also led by Peter Shell, 38, of Squirrel Hill, a self-employed computer musician and former CMU employee who describes himself as “a campus troublemaker from way back.” Shell met Waziruddin in 1995 while working on a campus campaign seeking justice for Jonny Gammage, the black motorist who had died during a traffic-stop encounter with white Brentwood Borough police.

Seated beside Tewolde in an empty CMU classroom, Shell and Waziruddin still seem amazed at what happened to Tewolde.

“All he had was four pieces of pita,” Waziruddin marvels.

“And a very dangerous pen,” Shell adds. The Coalition is hoping the pen is mightier than the sword: They posted his bail and are holding pickets and gathering letters urging District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. to drop or at least explain the charges. Waziruddin says the DA’s office is considering a meeting; Mike Manko, Zappala’s spokesperson, says he has never heard of the coalition’s request.

“When I was in prison I was waiting [for] just a kind of help that came from anywhere,” says Tewolde. Without money even for stamps and without a single relative realizing he had set out on a journey (or knowing which state Pittsburgh might be in, Waziruddin says), Tewolde nearly missed learning about the coalition, too. It took weeks for him to connect with the group formed to help him, especially since he claims that he was placed in isolation in the jail’s mental health ward, given several kinds of drugs and let out for only two random hours each week to shower and attempt a phone call -- when the coalition’s contact person may or may not have been home.

Waziruddin finally got on Tewolde’s official visitors list and saw him at the end of February. Even then, Tewolde wasn’t able to communicate very well. His memory of jail is still not clear, thanks to the medications he says were given to him involuntarily.

“They force me to inject” once, Tewolde says, “four or five polices were over there and they force.” He was later given pills for about two weeks -- antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, according to the misspelled drug names he was given by a prison worker -- but he says he never knew what they were, or why he had to take them, and they made him feel dizzy and sick to his stomach. “I was afraid to refuse because of my experiences with the injection,” he says. He was able to stop taking the pills only when a magistrate ordered him to be seen by the jail’s behavioral clinic, in time for him to plead not guilty at his March 15 hearing.

Bruce Dixon, head of the county Health Department, which oversees mental health care at the jail, is unfamiliar with the case but says, “Nobody has a legal authority to force anyone to take medications” in county prison. “In all honesty [prison workers] may have been dogmatic in what they said to [Tewolde]. There may have been a communication problem.” It is unusual but not unheard of for someone to have been evaluated by the jail’s behavioral clinic, Dixon adds; usually the unit, an arm of the courts, evaluates prisoners’ competence to stand trial.

Tewolde’s pro bono lawyer, Mike Healey of the Downtown firm Healey, Davidson and Hornack, is “concerned that [the case] is a reflection of some post-Sept. 11 hysteria or overreaction. Does it reflect a tendency to target immigrants or persons of color for arrest and suspicion of detention?” Tewolde is hoping the charges can be dismissed, if not at his June 19 hearing then sometime before the trial, but he realizes one factor may have caused his arrest in the first place and may be driving the process still: He may have been mistaken for an Arab or a Muslim.

His native country, Ethiopia, across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia, is neither. It is a place whose military government he tried hard to escape, efforts that landed him in jail several times, where he says he was interrogated and beaten and forced to join the military before escaping to a Yemen refugee camp for nearly eight years.

“It’s about the same experience here,” he says, turning away to smile.

At least a dozen local social justice groups form the Free Getu Coalition. A recent coalition press conference in front of the Greyhound bus station finds Tewolde standing anonymously in the circle of supporters as speaker after speaker calls for justice. He seems delighted at the speeches, and can hardly repress a smile at the mention of his name, or when a sign calling for his freedom is lifted. If he notices the disappointing lack of television coverage, he doesn’t mention it.

“At every court date we’ve had a picket,” Waziruddin tells the group defiantly, “and at every court date we’ve had a charge dropped.”

“What happened to Getu has made none of us safer,” adds a fellow member of the CMU activist group Zi, Mary Zimmerle. Molly Rush, head of the Thomas Merton Center, notes that when Tewolde visited her East Liberty organization she left him alone in the building’s kitchen and returned to find him sweeping the floor.

As Tim Stevens, head of the local NAACP chapter, moves forward to speak, a police wagon pulls up behind him. Three officers get out. The crowd eyes them warily as they shoo protestors off concrete planters owned by the office building next door and ostensibly make certain the sidewalk is passable.

“I didn’t know if we were being intimidated,” Stevens says as the police leave. “It is troubling when somebody comes to our city, their first 12-minute experience is [being] handcuffed.” Stevens hopes, he says, “we don’t have to feel intimidated when we assemble to talk about intimidation, because a couple of folks are sitting on some cement -- please!”

Then Stevens realizes that Tewolde has been standing silently in the crowd for the past 45 minutes. “I didn’t know it was him!” Stevens says. “He looks threatening as hell to me. I thought I was a small guy.”

Finally, Tewolde himself gets a chance to speak. His voice is entirely drowned out by buses and another police motorcycle passing. But he continues speaking. He doesn’t seem to notice the irony. And he has yet another pen in his shirt pocket the entire time.

writer: MARTY LEVINE

Comments:

 

1. Receptionists at DA Zappala's office acknowledged on Monday, June 10, that the DA's office did receive the Coalition's letter requesting a meeting, and that the DA would have seen it by the next morning.

2. Getu was given pills for five weeks, from sometime during or after his first week in prison until his release on bail, even after Getu had successfully passed the Behavior Clinic exam.  The Behavior Clinic exam was ordered on February 11, and is supposed to be administered within 72 hours.  As of a month later, at the Coalition's formation on March 11, there was no sign that Getu would be getting the exam or be allowed to see a lawyer.  The Coalition's intervention through the ACLU lead to an exam on March 13 (two days before his March 15 preliminary hearing) which he passed. Getu was still given drugs after the evaluation, but he was successfully able to refuse them at that time.  At other times he felt pressured to take the drugs because of the force used with his initial injection, because of guards accompanying the nurses, and because he was ordered to swallow the pills by staff.  From the beginning of the administration of the pills Getu doubted that the pills were justified, felt sick from taking them, and did not want them.

3. What Getu told the crowd was “Why are you hating?”(the last sentence on paragraph #6) not “hitting”.

Zi Position Statement on Case of Getu Berhanu Tewolde

Delivered at the Free Getu Coalition Press Conference on June 13, 2002:

 

Since September 11, Americans have been asking themselves about the need to choose between “homeland security” and civil rights, between suspending the judicial process and using reason to distinguish actual danger from imagined threats.  The case of Getu Berhanu Tewolde shows that this is a false choice – what is being done in the name of counter-terrorism today has nothing to do with security or vigilance, because what happened to Getu has not made any of us safer.  Instead, it has everything to do with fear and hysteria, because we convince ourselves to be afraid of people who we think are different from us.

All Getu had to do to be considered a threat to “civilization” and “democracy” was accidentally brush up against a manager on a Greyhound bus in Pittsburgh.  When Getu apologized, the manager immediately treated Getu as a threat, and the police were called.  The situation was labeled a Class I Bomb Threat, and the Bomb Squad, SWAT Units, and the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force were called.  Getu left the bus when ordered by the driver.  At the station he was approached by a police officer who did not identify himself or show a badge.  Getu says that the man looked like he was out to attack someone rather than investigate the facts.  When the man ordered Getu to sit, Getu refused -- the officer's first actions were to physically attack Getu, giving him a black eye and “disarming” him of a pen he was holding away from the officer.

               

Of course, the police did not find any bomb at the Greyhound station, and the FBI cleared Getu and refused to charge him.  The Pittsburgh Police arrested him anyway -- because of the “totality of the circumstances,” according to Commander Valenta.  This admission shows that what really happened here is not vigilance against terrorism, where objective facts are used to find criminals.  Instead, people feared Getu because he seemed different from them.  They thought they would be safer if Getu was beaten up and locked away in jail.  So what has happened here is not an example of reasonable security measures, but unrestrained hysteria.  Getu maintains he neither said nor did anything threatening.  Even though no explosives were found, and the FBI cleared him, the Pittsburgh Police thought he should be arrested anyway.

 

When we treat people who we think are different from us as the “other” and as the “enemy,” we dehumanize them.  This leads to horrible consequences, where we treat others in ways we would never tolerate for “ourselves.”  In prison, Getu was treated as less than human.  He was kept in 24-hour solitary confinement, forced to take heavy doses of psychiatric drugs that were unjustified, and denied visits from a lawyer until the Free Getu Coalition and ACLU intervened.  This is not meting out justice or incarcerating a criminal -- it is abuse.

 

The courts, which we are told weigh the evidence and offer due process, were going to let Getu slip deeper into this nightmare.  They've done it twice before here in post 9/11 Pittsburgh.  An art student who was arrested at the airport for having an Exacto knife went through a similar experience and had to plea bargain to leave the country even though there is no evidence that he is a terrorist.  Another man was arrested at the train station for asking why bags were not being checked by security as someone could bring a bomb -- he faced similar charges as Getu, but plead guilty because he thought he would be treated worse if he fought what was happening to him. A system that can allow these people to be victims in this way is not a system of justice, but a system bent on prosecuting and persecuting as much as possible those who look or act “different.”

 

If we in Pittsburgh, and in the US, do not see that what is happening today is not about security but about racial fears and war hysteria, and that criminalizing people based on fear does not make us any safer, then there will be more Getus.  Zi asks that you join the Free Getu Coalition in spreading awareness of this case and the pattern of abuse it exposes, as well as in demanding that all charges against Getu be dropped.  Work with us to change our society.