On Saturday night, Dahir Adan told his family that he was going out to buy a new phone. But when he got to the mall, he was wearing a security uniform that he had kept from a previous job and was wielding a knife, and his resulting stabbing rampage has left his family simply shell-shocked.
On Monday night, the family released their first statement since Adan’s rampage, saying that they were in “deep shock as everyone else is in the state of Minnesota.”
“We are devastated by the incomprehensible tragic event of last Saturday evening,” they said, according to a statement that was read aloud by their attorney, Abdulwahid Osman.
They said that they were struggling to understand why Adan, a Somali man who had lived in the United States since he was a toddler, would go on a rampage like that.
“The family said he was happy, joyful, worked full time, did well in high school. The last time he went out, he said he was going to buy an iPhone,” said Haji Yussuf, a local community leader.
While the FBI is currently investigating the attack “as a potential act of terrorism,” there is not yet any evidence to show that Adan’s attack was motivated by ties to ISIS or other extremist groups, though rumors to that effect have been circulating since the attack.
“We haven’t uncovered anything that would suggest [he was not a] lone attacker at this point,” St. Cloud’s police chief, William Blair Anderson, said Sunday.
