Countdown to Wrongful Conviction Day: Friday, October 2, 2105; 12 days. For information: http://www.aidwyc.org/wcd-2015/
"It’s been some 17 months since Gugsa Abraham Dabela was found dead by
a Redding, Conn., roadside. By all accounts, just hours before his body
was found, Dabela was hanging out with friends, having a good time and
handing out business cards for his new law practice. His family has been reeling in the aftermath; questions don’t seem to
have straightforward answers, and facts don’t add up. In a heartfelt
appeal to the public, last month
the “Justice 4 Abe” website was launched, hoping to get people, especially people in Redding, thinking..........Some five hours after Gugsa Dabela, a charismatic Ethiopian-American
private attorney, was found the early morning of April 5, 2014, in his
overturned vehicle with a gunshot wound to his head, Redding
investigators ruled the death a suicide. The family is not certain,
however, if that is the case. “The information that’s been processed by the various crime labs and
the police etc., they just raise more questions than actually bring
answers,” Albab Dabela says. “The classification of his death as a
suicide happened five hours after he was allegedly found by the police,
and they’ve conducted a suicide investigation almost to confirm their
assumption, but the actual facts ... don’t seem to support a suicide
conclusion.”.........The family is using the website as a means of listing as many points
of questioning as it can, given that the case remains an open
investigation, along with providing the documentation it has to support
the framework of its questions. One example, Albab Dabela offers, was that last year, the state crime
lab excluded her brother as a contributor to the DNA recovered from the
gun, particularly the trigger of the gun. That means there is no
physical evidence to support that “Abe,” as Gugsa Dabela was
affectionately called, was the last person who fired his gun or that it
was his gun that actually ended his life. There is also the fact that after talking to experts on suicide and
thinking back on the 35-year-old’s life and behavior, the family can
find no indication that he was suicidal or had a history of having been
suicidal. “My brother, I know, died of a gunshot wound to the backside of his
head, in his overturned car. No one has been able to explain how his car
overturned, and no one’s been able to explain who or how or why he was
shot. But I know he died of a gunshot wound. We’re trying to get the
whole story,” Albab Dabela says."
http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2015/09/_justice4abe_more_than_a_year_later_the_family_of_conn_lawyer_gugsa_abraham.html