For new readers, visit ourprevious post on the case of a Burmese Muslim (Rohingya?) refugee, Esar Met, who is charged with the 2008 murder of a 7-year-old Christian (Karen) refugee girl in their Salt Lake City apartment building.
Esar Met in 2012 when he was ordered to stand trial. http://www.4utah.com/s/d/story/JGtHquvxrE-9U39U45sspQ
This is the latest on the trial that is expected to run until January 24th. From The Salt Lake Tribune:
Hser Ner Moo suffered more than a dozen painful injuries in the hour before she died, an autopsy revealed, but it was a tear to her heart that sealed the girl’s fate, the state’s chief medical examiner testified Monday.
Dr. Todd Grey took the stand on the fifth day of the trial of Esar Met, a Burmese refugee accused of kidnapping, assaulting and killing the 7-year-old girl in 2008.
He walked the 11-person jury through the child’s injuries, several of which he described as “excruciating.”
Grey ruled that the sum of these injuries caused the child’s death, but noted the wound to the girl’s heart — a tear in the right atrium — was the most lethal.
“This would have been excruciating pain,” Grey said. “This was a homicide, a death due to an intentional action by another person.”
Met, 27, who calmly sat through the graphic testimony Monday morning, is charged in 3rd District Court with first-degree felony child kidnapping and aggravated murder. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Met had only been placed in the apartment building a month before the murder presumably as a newly arrived refugee from the camps in Thailand. This murder did not have to happen.
If he is found guilty the cost of his incarceration for life will fall on the taxpayers of Utah. Every “welcoming” city should be demanding that the US State Department and its contractors—in this case Catholic Charities or the International Rescue Committee (which just last week was begging for the US to admit 12,000 Syrians)—be sure they screen very well the ‘refugees’ they drop-off in your city!
Imagine also what this trial is costing the taxpayers.
Maybe some Member of Congress or Senate could introduce legislation that says when refugees commit crimes the cost is not borne by the local jurisdiction, but by the feds. Of course that is taxpayer dollars too, but at least it would send a message!
Why are we resettling so many Muslims? Why any Muslims at all?
It ultimately falls on the US State Department to have some understanding of Muslim/Christian tensions among the refugees they resettle in America even if it was Catholic Community Services or the International Rescue Committee (federal contractors in Utah) who ultimately placed Muslim Esar Met in the middle of a Burmese Christian Karen group of refugees. We learned from the extensive reporting of former Salt Lake Tribune reporter Julia Lyon that the two (the alleged murderer and his young victim) were in separate parts of the camp in Thailand—but “America made them neighbors.”
The girl who loved pink, Hser Ner Moo.
I could hardly sleep last night after reviewing some articles on the on-going murder trial of 7-year-old Hser Ner Moo. It is a terrible shame this “epic tragedy” is not being covered by the national news media.
I know it’s not covered because Met is a Muslim and because the average TV news outlet, even conservative ones, cannot bring itself to show the dark side of refugee resettlement where most viewers want only to feel warm and fuzzy feelings about the bright future we supposedly offer tens of thousands of third-worlders every year.
Hereis a pretty good editorial at the Salt Lake Tribune, with this section (below) catching my attention. Who are these people?
I’ve found that until a crisis occurs, most residents of “welcoming” cities have no clue they have “welcomed” so many refugees into their community. And, that is because the State Department and its contractors operate secretively. By law they are supposed to “consult” with political leaders, but you know how that goes, some fearful ‘leaders’ are informed but keep their mouths shut for fear of being labeled racists/xenophobes should they question the feds’ wisdom.
Editor Terry Orme:
The murder of the friendly girl who loved to dress in pink appeared, at first, to be a straightforward crime story. But it soon became much more, a window into a community in the Salt Lake Valley that most of us didn’t know existed.Who are these people who live in the South Parc apartments? Where did they come from? What is their story?
To find out, former Tribune reporter Julia Lyon, with a grant from the International Reporting Project, traveled to Southeast Asia, and the refugee camps in Thailand, where Hser Ner Moo was born, and where her family and Esar Met’s family lived before coming to Utah. Lyon’s prize-winning report is available at sltrib.com.
[….]
Their lives would intersect in South Salt Lake amid a small refugee community.
You can read about details of the case and the weeping parents as they took the witness stand, but here is the section I found most telling and why I say the US State Department should never have allowed Met to be placed in this living situation. In court, Met’s attorneys are trying to pin the murder on Met’s Karen roommates (with whom he “had been assigned to live” a month earlier) or we would not likely even hear about the religious/ethnic tension going on.
Reporter Marissa Lang:
The child’s oldest brother Ker Ker Po told jurors that he knew the men in Apartment 472. He went over there to drink beer and watch movies. They were his friends.
But Ker Ker Po never met the man who lived downstairs. He saw him once, briefly, but he didn’t care to speak to him, he said, because he knew him to be a Muslim man of Indian origin.
Met’s people are different, Ker Ker Po said. They speak different languages and practice different religions. They don’t share customs. They don’t mingle.
Met, who had also been living in a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand before moving to the U.S., arrived in the apartment about a month before the slaying. The other men had been there much longer.
Defense attorneys painted a picture of Met’s relationship with his four roommates as cold — stemming from their negative perception of his ethnic background.
Hser Ner Moo’s parents said they didn’t know their daughter ever went to the apartment to play with Met. The father typically did not allow her to enter the homes of others — particularly those who were not ethnic Karen.
I’m not beating around the bush! The way one makes sure there are no more “epic tragedies” like this one—don’t resettle any more Muslim ‘refugees’ from anywhere. Why bring the problems from most areas of the world—Africa, the Middle East, Asia—to be replayed in America? And, if you argue that Met was just a mentally impaired man, then why are we bringing those now too?
For new readers, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops testified to the US State Department in May that they wanted to see more Burmese Muslim Rohingya resettlement in America. Why? Aren’t there enough destitute and persecuted Christians for the Catholics to care for?
A radio station reporter has discovered that Pittsburgh, PA has taken a lot of refugees in need of health treatment (including mental health treatment) that they may not be getting. I’ll bet it’s happening where you live too, and partly because no one is available to translate for the mental health provider.
Esar Met was not normal in the camp. If a reporter figured that out, surely the US State Dept. knew.
The issue of cities and counties being responsible for appropriate interpreters came up the other day when we wrote about the Utah murder casewhere the Salt Lake City police must have figured any Burmese person would do to communicate with the newly arrested Esar Met. Met is a Muslim, probably a Rohingya. If he is Rohingya he speaks a Bengali dialect.
So, think about it, according to federal law, local governments are required to provide interpreters, not just in law enforcement cases, but when helping refugees get the appropriate medical treatment and in the hundreds of languages and dialects spoken by refugees.
Increasingly, we are hearing of mental health problems in the refugee community going unattended. Add the cost of all this (treatment and translators) when determining if yours is to be a “welcoming” community for refugees.
The US State Department resettles refugees with mental problems as they surely knew Esar Met was not normal.
In the Utah rape/murder case an article in the Salt Lake Tribune in 2008 tells us this about the accused murderer (below). Interestingly his mother did not want to come to America, but the US State Department figured Met would make a good addition to a multicultural America—help diversify Utah!
A challenged son » About a mile away, people at Mae La knew Esar Met was not normal. He often sat alone, talking and laughing to himself in the Muslim section of the camp where his family lived. Or he played with children years younger, shooting rubber bands in the camp’s narrow lanes, flicking marbles across the rocky, dirt patches that were his neighbors’ yards.
He was the eldest of eight children, but when he argued with his younger brothers, he was the one to cry.
As a boy, he could not remember what he learned in class. His mother, Ra He Mar, knew her son was not very smart and worried he might become even slower as he grew older. After he had to repeat second grade, she let him drop out of school.
Friends told her the family should find someone to “check his brain,” but Esar’s parents thought they couldn’t afford to have him tested.
I’m surprised there is no insanity plea in the case yet, maybe it is still coming.
Reporter Erika Beras: no system in place when refugees are new to the town.
Back to Pittsburgh where there is NO SYSTEM IN PLACE for dealing with mental health issues and language barriers.
From 90.5 WESA (NPR in Pittsburgh), thanks to reader Joanne:
Refugees to the region face a number of challenges, unfamiliarity with a different language is even more complicated when trying to obtain health care.
90.5 WESA Behavioral Health Reporter Erika Beras is embarking on a month-long series on the challenges refugees face in the Pittsburgh area to obtain health care. She says her interest in the topic was sparked by the high population of refugees in Pittsburgh.
“The refugee community here has grown and grown. And in that time I’d been talking to providers and I’d been in different situations at specialty courts and I keep hearing stories about different refugees who have come in with different issues and how people are struggling to meet their needs. They don’t quite have a system in place after the first few months a refugee is in town.”
“When you’re talking about refugees, they’re coming with acute needs…Refugees are coming from conflicts that most of us will never experience and so they, in addition to having the trauma they need to get over, they have language barriers that make it difficult for them to access health care, many of them have low income status, they’re disconnected from their communities and so we are seeing this throughout the U.S. as a pretty big challenge.”
So who is responsible for refugees when they first arrive in Pittsburgh? Catholic Charities, Jewish Family & Children Services and AJAPO (Acculturation for Justice, Access & Peace Outreach) (here). Ms. Beras needs to start her investigation right here—with these three federal contractors.
For ambitious readers, this is our 190th post on health problems and refugees. See Health issues category here.
Esar Met in the courtroom yesterday in Salt Lake City showed no emotion as translators kept him informed. http://m.sltrib.com/sltrib/mobile3/57363092-219/met-girl-police-trial.html.csp
Yesterday we reported that jury selection had begun in the trial of a Burmese refugee accused of raping and murdering a 7-year-old fellow refugee in 2008.
SALT LAKE CITY — Paramedic Andrew Maurer well remembers being led into a South Salt Lake basement where the body of 7-year-old missing girl had just been found.
“It was spooky that night,” he testified Tuesday, noting the dark basement and all the flashes going off from police investigators taking pictures. “It just looked like a horror scene to me.”
Maurer was one of 10 people who testified on the first day of the murder trial of Esar Met, which began nearly six years after the body of young Hser Ner Moo was found in Met’s basement bathroom.
Met, 26, is charged with aggravated murder and child kidnapping, first-degree felonies, in the March 31, 2008, death of the Burmese refugee girl. Her disappearance sparked a wide search effort, leading to the discovery of her body the next day.
Maurer and former South Salt Lake Fire Capt. Paul Rasmussen were called by police to the basement of Met’s apartment to confirm what detectives already suspected, that the little girl was dead.
“I observed a body that was in the bottom of a shower area. I was taken back by what I saw,” Rasmussen testified. “She had a lot of blood all over her.”
Hser’s hair was matted with blood. Rasmussen bent down to touch her skin and try to move her leg, and found she was “very, very cold.” Rigor mortis had already set in.
“I saw the girl in the bottom of the shower stall, curled up, face down, her head was away from us,” Maurer testified. “I could see that (her left arm) was bent back, broken.”
The testimony of the paramedics describing the gruesome crime scene was accompanied by graphic photos that were shown to the jury.
One of the things the defense is arguing is that Esar Met and the girl were friends and thus her DNA might have already been on his clothes (yeh, right!). However, when you watch the news clip associated with this story, note that Met had only arrived at the apartment complex a month before, so one wonders how close a “friendship” this could have been.
I would love to know which resettlement contractor placed him, a Muslim, in a building housing Christian Karen people. Do you think the contractor learned any lessons?
The murder happened in 2008, but the trial was delayed (and the death penalty removed) due to an “extreme language barrier”:
Though the girl was killed in March 2008, the case has stalled due to language barriers and the Burmese man’s struggles to understand the court process.Translators are being rotated during the court hearings, constantly interpreting to Met what others are saying. Several times during Tuesday’s hearing, attorneys were asked to slow down while questioning witnesses so the translator could relate everything to Met. Met wore a set of headphones as the interpreters spoke softly into a microphone so he could hear.
Because of the extreme language barrier the case has presented, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill decided not to seek the death penalty in the case.
We will keep you posted as the trial progresses. Don’t hold your breath for any reference to the alleged murderer’s religion (is he a Rohingya Muslim?).
But defense attorneys painted a picture of Met’s relationship with his four roommates as cold — stemming from their being from different ethnic groups.
This is a horrible case we reportedfrom the time it happened in 2008. I’ll bet you won’t hear about it even on Fox News!
Yesterday, jury selection began in the murder trial of Esar Met who was arrested shortly after the murder of a Hser Ner Moo a 7-year-old Burmese Karen Christian girl who had been resettled in the same apartment building with Met.
In the camp, where they both lived prior to the US State Department contractors (which was it? Catholic Charities?) sending them to Utah, they lived in separate parts of the camp since Muslims and Christians in Burma have had a long and tense history (it is not just the Buddhists who find the Rohingya Muslims a problem).
I speculated from the outset that Met was a Muslim, but didn’t learn until 2012 (a reader sent me an old story on the case) that one reporter did have the guts to find out. Here is the post I wrote in June 2012. This is the lengthy Salt Lake Tribunefeature piece which includes these telling lines (emphasis mine):
Rage flashed through the muddy lanes where Hser Ner Moo had once skipped rope and played hide-and-seek. In the camp, tension lingers between the Karen and Muslims, and some choose to live apart. Hser Ner Moo and Esar had lived in separate sections of Mae La.
America had made them neighbors.
Here is the news yesterday at the Salt Lake Tribune as jury selection began in Met’s murder trial:
Jury selection began Monday for a Burmese refugee accused of kidnapping, raping and killing a young girl at the South Salt Lake apartment complex where they both lived in 2008.
Opening statements and evidence in Esar Met’s three-week-long trial are scheduled to begin Tuesday.
Met, 27, is charged in 3rd District Court with first-degree felony counts of aggravated murder and child kidnapping in connection with the March 2008 slaying of 7-year-old Hser Ner Moo.
Hser Ner Moo disappeared on March 31, 2008, prompting hundreds of volunteers to search for her before police found her body in Met’s basement apartment the next night. Her family lived in the same complex, and the girl was acquainted with Met.
She was found face down in Met’s shower, still in the pink shirt, pink skirt and pink coat she was wearing the day before. Police have said the girl was likely dead within an hour of leaving her family’s nearby apartment.
Defense argued to have gruesome photos withheld from the jury:
The defense also petitioned the court to have prosecutors use diagrams instead of certain graphic photos that, the defense argued, are “too gruesome” for jurors.
Prosecutors called the photos relevant, saying they show the brutality with which the child was killed and the injuries she suffered.
“The person who did this, who dragged her into the shower and left her, intended her to die,” prosecutor Robert Parrish said. “They are not gruesome photographs in and of themselves.”
Atherton later ruled that only two photos — one depicting the 7-year-old girl crumpled inside a bathroom stall; the other, a photo of the girl’s bruised and damaged genitals — could be used at trial.
No death penalty! The taxpayers of the state of Utah will be paying for this guy for life (if he is found guilty)!
Maybe the resettlement agency that in its infinite wisdom placed the two in the same building should take up a collection for his care in prison. In fact, in a lot of these crime cases involving refugees, I think there should be some financial responsibility on the US State Department and the resettlement contractors when one of their refugees gets in trouble with the law. Maybe they will be more selective next time.
To move the case along, prosecutors decided to forgo seeking the death penalty against Met. Instead, Met could face life without the possibility of parole or 20 years to life in prison, if found guilty of aggravated murder.
Read the whole article, there is a problem coming in this case regarding interpreters. One thing few “welcoming” communities consider is the cost and availability of competent interpreters when refugees end up in police custody or in court, or even need medical treatment. Federal law requires the local community to find and pay the interpreter. We have learned in some immigrant-rich counties the cost can run into millions of dollars.
