Liberators In Action: Yemeni American Community

For her, the day started like any other. As she waited for her school bus to arrive, she looked forward to seeing her friends as usual. But as the bus approached, a man grabbed her at gunpoint and took her away.

Fellow students who witnessed the abduction, contacted the police immediately and began working with them to track the location of the sixteen-year-old's cellphone. Thirty minutes later they discovered she was at a Sunoco gas station.

The abductor had stopped at the gas station to buy cigarettes, but when he made his victim pay for them, the store clerk, Abdulrahman Abohatem, felt something was wrong. At that moment the girl silently mouthed the word "help."

Abdulrahman, an immigrant from Yemen, stepped out from behind the protective glass counter and forcibly escorted the kidnapper out of the store. The police were just arriving. Abdulrahman pointed out the man and he was arrested on the spot.

In the small Detroit neighborhood where the abduction took place, a liberation was also taking place. The girl was rescued through the quick action of the students, the responsiveness of the police, and the store clerk going beyond his cash register duties to respond to a girl in trouble. 

They were all heroes who had the courage to act in the moment. All were liberators, too, freeing the girl from grip of a 48-year-old registered sex offender. All were participants in getting a dangerous man off the streets once more.