Sabiriin Ali, Sagal Hersi, Siham Adam, Sahra Gesaade and Salma Abdikadir were “pearls of the community — and the brightness of our future,” their mosque director said
The five women had just left a Minneapolis shopping center after an evening of shopping and getting Henna for a friend’s Saturday wedding, when the driver of an SUV gunned through a red light, crashing into their car at 95 miles an hour.
The close friends – Sabiriin Ali, 17, Sagal Hersi and Siham Adam, both 19, and Sahra Gesaade and Salma Abdikadir, both 20 – were all pronounced dead at the scene Friday.
Khalid Omar, the director of Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center, a mosque in Bloomington, where the women were members, called the women “pearls of the community — and the brightness of our future,” in an interview with KSTP-TV.
The women’s tragic deaths have hit the close-knit Muslim community hard. Just weeks earlier the mosque had celebrated the high school graduation of Ali, Omar told the local television station.
Adam, Gesaade and Abdikadir were all college students, and Abdikadir also taught at the center on weekends, according to KSTP-TV and CBS Minnesota. Several of the women had spoken with their parents just 15 minutes before the crash, KSTP-TV reported.
Around 10:15 p.m. Friday, a state trooper eyed the speeding SUV but was unable to pull the driver over before the fateful crash, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told CBS Minnesota. The driver has not yet been released from the hospital, Adam Kennedy, a spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department told .
Traffic camera footage of the fateful crash circulated online this weekend, after law enforcement leaked the video, Jamal Osman, Minneapolis City Council Member Ward 6, said in a statement on Twitter Sunday.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara called the leak “concerning,” according to reporting by Fox9.
A funeral for the women has been scheduled for today. More than $350,000 had been raised in the names of the women by Monday morning.
“Losing anyone, that’s a tragedy,” Omar told CBS Minnesota. “But losing five young people at the same time is something that is very hard to process.”
Kennedy says that charges against the driver, whose name has not been released by police, are expected later this week.