Saint-Paul man convicted of murder of tobacco store employee

Abdullah Arif's wife said the couple fled Iraq to escape violence and killings of adults and children. They came to the United States to seek peace and to make a life there, Maeda Obaidi told the court Friday.

And Arif worked hard to learn the language and become a U.S. citizen, she said.

“He took care of me and my children and did his best to keep us safe,” she said in a statement read by a prosecutor and translated into Arabic. “We had the hope and vision to continue to thrive here in America.”

But then Arif was “senselessly and violently taken away,” she said, by Elias-Kareem Hany Aly, who fatally shot the 48-year-old Stillwater father of four during a confrontation last year at Union Tobacco on St. Paul’s West Side, where he worked part-time.

“I lost the love of my life and the children lost their beloved father,” his wife said.

Ramsey County District Judge David Ireland sentenced Aly, 22, of St. Paul, to 13 years and nine months in prison for the murder, rejecting a request from his attorney to reduce the sentences under the state guidelines. The latter provided for a sentence of between 12 and 16 and a half years.

In exchange for a consecutive guilty plea in February to second-degree unintentional murder, the prosecution agreed to dismiss the intentional murder charge at sentencing.

Arif was killed after confronting Aly and his friends inside the store located along Stryker Avenue and Stevens Street and then outside. Arif had asked Aly to remove a mask that covered his face in the store and, as Aly was leaving, he pulled down a doorbell. Arif got out with a baseball bat and walked toward their Dodge Durango. Aly shot him once while he was sitting in the front passenger seat, the bullet piercing his heart and liver.

Less than an hour before the killing, Aly was at the same downtown courthouse Friday for a hearing on a June 2020 misdemeanor charge of possession of a firearm by an ineligible person.