KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Muslim teenager was run down by a sport utility vehicle and killed on Thursday, and the driver has been charged with first-degree murder in what the police are investigating as a possible hate crime.
The victim, Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein, 15, was killed outside a Somali community center here.
According to a probable-cause statement, the suspect, Ahmed H. Aden, 34, of Kansas City, struck the teenager as he got into a car. A witness reported seeing the boy “fly through the air” before the S.U.V. ran over him. His legs were nearly severed, and he died in a hospital of his wounds.
Prosecutors were requesting a $250,000 bond. No lawyer was listed for Mr. Aden in online court records.
In the weeks before the crash, worshipers at the center said, they saw a black S.U.V. painted with threatening messages at the community center and cruising around a nearby shopping area. One of the messages was “Islam is worse than Ebola,” said Mohamed Ahmed, 13.
“I would have thought the police would have taken care of it, but they didn’t,” he said.
Mohamed Farah, 50, a friend of the boy’s family, said he had called the police more than once in October about a suspicious man who had been coming around the center.
“I feel like I lost a part of my body,” he said.
Court documents say Mr. Aden crashed the S.U.V. and got out of the vehicle with a knife. Occupants of the car that the boy had been getting into told police officers that they had followed Mr. Aden, and they pointed him out. One witness said the suspect had swung what appeared to be a baseball bat at people, and another witness reported that Mr. Aden had pulled out a handgun and said, “Stay there,” as he tried to get away.
Mr. Aden initially told the authorities that he had lost control of his vehicle. He later said he had struck the teenager because he looked like a man who had threatened him several days earlier, the probable-cause statement said.
Federal agents were assisting in the investigation and “have opened this matter as a federal civil rights investigation as a potential hate crimes violation,” according to an F.B.I. spokeswoman, Bridget Patton. Ms. Patton said she could not release any information on why the case might be considered a hate crime.
Bakar Abdalla, 31, said the boy’s father was a teacher at the community center.
Khadra Dirir, the victim’s aunt, said he had regularly studied the Quran and had delivered a group prayer the night he died.
“If you asked him a verse, he could tell the chapter,” she sai
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