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Night of violence leaves one young Omahan dead, another in prison, and their fathers reeling

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Jacobi Terry had just been sentenced for the cold-blooded rifle blast that killed a 21-year-old Omaha man working as a store clerk.

Terry

Then a father sought out another father in a Douglas County Courthouse hallway Thursday.

“I’m so sorry for what my son did to your son,” Jacobi Terry’s father told Fahd Tairi, father of Bahy Altairi. “He was wrong.”

Tairi nodded, stifling tears.

The elder Terry then turned to Deputy Douglas County Attorney Brenda Beadle, the prosecutor in the case. Terry had pleaded no contest to second-degree murder for bursting into a tobacco store at 32nd and L Streets and blasting Altairi in the chest with a .22 caliber rifle. Later that night, Terry shot up a home near 75th Street and Hartman Avenue, leaving bystander Jared Sedlacek, then 26, with partial paralysis in his leg.

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Judge Leigh Ann Retelsdorf sentenced Terry, now 19, to 70 to 150 years in prison for the one-day rampage. But Terry’s father directed his frustration toward prosecutors in the case.

“Ms. Beadle, why’d you have to be so harsh?” Terry’s father called out, palms up. “He’s just a baby.”

“He’s not a baby,” Beadle said calmly. “He killed someone.”

As he boarded an elevator, Terry’s dad turned to Altairi’s father. “Again. I’m sorry. So sorry.”

Bahy Altairi was 21 when he was gunned down by a robber trying to steal a gun an Omaha store used for protection.

The elevator doors slid shut. Tairi lowered his chin and shrugged.

“What can you say?” he asked. “The damage is done.”

Indeed, it wasn’t hard Thursday to survey the damage done by a teen on a gun spree on Oct. 2, 2019.

Two rows behind Terry were relatives of Sedlacek, who had to endure two months of hospitalization after being shot by Terry.

Down the courtroom row from Terry’s parents was Tairi, the 44-year-old father who is so racked with guilt over his son’s death that he, at one point, considered suicide and rarely sleeps more than two to three hours a night.

Behind Terry were his mom and dad. The couple separated when Terry was young. Terry had had trouble in school but rarely had trouble outside it. In fact, the Oct. 2, 2019, crime spree was his first foray into illegal activity, beyond his rampant use of marijuana.

What a criminal baptism it was. In the weeks leading up to the crime, Terry, who had had a hard time making friends in high school, hooked up via social media with two former junior-high friends, Marshawn Box and Tretavious Knox.

In time, the three talked about getting their hands on guns. In a text, Terry talked about wanting to do a “lizzie for a glizzie”: lizzie is slang for a lick, which is slang for robbery; glizzie for a Glock handgun.

That Oct. 2, Terry went into the Tobacco & Vapes store and chatted up Altairi, a friendly and outgoing 21-year-old whose dad owns that store and five others in the Omaha area. Terry even greeted Altairi, reaching across the counter to shake his hand.

An hour later, Terry burst into the store with rifle drawn. As Terry pulled down a cabinet — apparently after learning that Altairi kept a gun on a lower shelf — Altairi reflexively reached to right the cabinet. Terry blasted him in the chest.

A few hours after that, Terry and the two young men drove to a north-central home where a young man was going to sell them a gun. The man thought something was hinky and retreated. As he did, Terry sprayed bullets into the garage. One of the bullets went through a garage wall and struck Sedlacek, who was attending a kids’ birthday party.

Terry “went from 0 to 100 in a day,” said his attorney, Douglas County Public Defender Tom Riley.

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His school behavior had warning signs, though none beckoned a night of unsparing violence. Terry recently scored 74 on an IQ test — a score that reflects a “significant limitation in educational functioning,” according to the American Psychiatric Association.

“He needed special ed,” Riley said. “He wasn’t getting it.”

Along the way, he acted out. He had 20 incidents of disruptive behavior and was expelled from a middle school for possessing a knife. He got kicked out of the OPS alternative school for “making threats and intimidation.” In the 2016-2017 school year, he was cited four times for refusing to do work and being disruptive. On Feb. 16, 2017, he lost computer privileges when he googled the term “hollow point bullets.”

In ninth grade at Central, Riley said, Terry had a 1.25 GPA. He was passed to 10th grade, where, “not surprisingly he failed every single class he took,” Riley wrote in a sentencing brief.

“Jacobi’s attendance at school during the 2018-2019 school year, including summer school, was dreadful, as he missed 100 days of class,” Riley wrote. “Even more inexplicably, OPS school records show that with a 0.00 GPA in Grade 10, Jacobi was ‘promoted’ to Grade 11 which commenced in the fall of 2019, (two) months prior to his arrest.”

He attended just 50 percent of classes that fall. Then came Oct. 2.

“It’s absolutely flabbergasting to me that you promote a kid with those grades, or lack of grades,” Riley said. “This apparently was going on without the knowledge of Mom, who was working full-time and assumed her son was at school. ... He was kind of rudderless.”

Altairi was not. His father had moved the family, natives of Yemen, from Harlem, where he owned a bodega in the New York City borough, to Omaha on the thought the city would be safer. He bought his first store here in 2016. Soon after, his oldest son joined him, helping out at the stores.

Like Terry, Altairi also struggled with high school but powered through to get his general-equivalency diploma, his father said. He loved chatting up customers and worked hard — 12 hours a day, six days a week.

About six months before his death, Altairi had been minding the store when a young man came in with a BB gun, brandished it and tried to rob the place. Altairi had fired a warning shot at the young man, who was later caught.

His dad scolded him. “I told him never do that again — just give up the money, it’s not worth it,” his dad said Thursday.

Now, he said, he’s trying to delete the reminders of the deadly robbery. He’s watched the brazen crime on his store’s surveillance video. His son with his hands up as Terry — no mask, no disguise — takes aim. Terry pulling down a cabinet. His son briefly, reflexively lowering his hands. Terry blasting him in the chest.

Tairi said his wife and friends helped him through thoughts of suicide. He said he wiped his phone of all the photos he had of his son, for fear they’d send him into a spiral.

The effusive young man would be 24 now. Bahy’s wife and young son, now 3, are still in their native Yemen.

Tairi and his wife, Nawal, have a newborn of their own, a 6-month-old little brother that Bahy never met. Tairi said he and Nawal carry on for him and their 19-year-old son.

Tairi says he reads the Koran and tries to find peace. But there’s work to do. Stores to run. Sleep to lose. And boys to raise. Two, instead of three.

Tairi said he’s mourned before: the death of parents, of a brother.

“Losing a son is different — it’s like I lost a part of me,” he said. “My wife and I — we both try to keep each other strong. But it’s more difficult than I ever imagined.

“Something will always be missing from our family.”

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Bahy Altairi

Bahy Altairi was 21 when he was gunned down by a robber trying to steal a gun an Omaha store used for protection.

Terry