No, not that one! This Philadephia Story is not the romantic comedy of yesteryear, it’s a shocking and sordid tale that gives us a little more insight into how illegal immigration and asylum in America is changing the way we live.
Here is how it begins:
AS THE CARGO ship docked at a port near New York City, 16-year-old Mohamed Fornah sat hidden inside a shipping container, alone and scared.
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He had fled Sierra Leone with no money, clothes or possessions.
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All he carried was the guilt of fleeing his homeland without his three sisters who were kidnapped by diamond-hungry rebels.
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Life had not been kind to him. When he was little, rebels killed his parents. When he was a teen, they raped his sisters, then stabbed him, leaving him for dead.
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Mindful of his illegal entry into America, Fornah, who now has a green card, crept out of the shipping container on a summer night in 2002. He made his way to Philadelphia where a childhood friend from Sierra Leone had moved.
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He hoped he’d be safe here.
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But Philadelphia, it turned out, offered little refuge from the terror and torture he left behind.
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At 19, Fornah was jailed on a robbery charge and a series of misdemeanors in December 2005 after a dispute with his girlfriend in which he took her car keys. Unable to post bail, he was locked up at the city’s Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility.
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The night of March 24, 2006, just two weeks before prosecutors dropped all charges against him, his mentally deranged cell mate savagely beat and raped him in a dark, isolated cell while top prison officials debated how to rescue him, according to internal prison documents obtained by the Daily News.
Nevermind that he was in jail for a robbery, it’s going to be o.k. because he got a lawyer. I wonder what the City of Brotherly Love is going to have to pay to repair Mohamed’s manhood?
They know you are not a man no more. People are always going to look at you like you are a female,” said Fornah during a recent interview in his attorney’s Broomall office, with Famiglio and co-counsel Stuart A. Carpey by his side.
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“Now I don’t feel like a man.”
Note also that the alleged rapist is a Muslim and they had been happily praying together earlier.
Then here is an interesting final point. Thanks to smugglers, Muslim Taxi cab drivers and asylum lawyers from HIAS, all is well and Fornah is on his way to becoming a citizen and probably will live well on a bundle of cash from the taxpayers of Philadelphia who will no doubt believe his whole sad story.
For weeks, he hid in a room under the ship’s deck with four or five other refugees. Mr. John brought him meals three times a day and warned him to stay hidden.
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When the ship docked at port, Fornah said he had no idea he was in America. In fact, he’s still not sure which port he arrived in – New York or Newark, N.J.
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A taxi driver, a Muslim like him, helped Fornah call his friend in Philadelphia and paid for a one-way bus ticket here.
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“I told him, ‘I don’t know where I’m at and I’m scared. I’m afraid,’ ” Fornah said. “He said, ‘You are in the U.S. You better find a way to support yourself. If not, they are going to arrest you.’ “
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Fornah soon reunited with an uncle who had fled Sierra Leone and settled in Philadelphia years earlier. Fornah moved into his uncle’s Southwest Philly rowhouse.
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“I was shocked – shocked when I saw him,” said his uncle, Edward Abu, who works as a taxi driver. “I said, ‘Oh my, I thought you were dead. How did you get here?’ “
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It took Fornah nearly four years to get his green card. The government granted him “special immigrant juvenile status,” said his immigration attorney, Judith Bernstein-Baker, executive director of HIAS, an international migration and refugee resettlement agency.
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“He had a very tough time in Sierra Leone and a very tough time in the United States,” Bernstein-Baker said. “The system was not kind to him, but in the end, the system in the United States did right by him and now I hope he can become whole and live out his potential.”
By the way, HIAS is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and is among the Top Ten volags contracted by the US State Department to resettle refugees and asylees. Note that the Philadelphia Daily News article does not tell you what HIAS stands for. Hmmmm.