"He Just Went Off" On Jan. 26, Osman Abdullahi was killed by police after attacking a fellow resident at a group home for the mentally ill near H Street NE. The question no one can answer: What was he doing there to begin with?

On Nov. 1, 2008, Osman Abdullahi moved into a two-story group house just off of H Street NE. He took a bed in a second-floor bedroom he shared with two other men.

The house was filled with several people just like him—mentally ill and poor, seeking a break between case-manager visits, disability checks, and morning meds. Located at 830 7th St. NE, the home wasn’t licensed or supervised.

The lack of supervision extended to the utilities: Sometimes the heat came on; sometimes it was just cold. The huge cupboards were bare. The brand-new stainless steel refrigerator was empty. There was mold in the basement bedroom. The rooms were packed with beds.

Occupants brought in their own problems, too. One visitor recalled seeing drug paraphernalia and liquor bottles inside. Abdullahi’s roommates were coming off of stints in the Psychiatric Institute of Washington and St. Elizabeths.

Residents came and went as they pleased. The front door was rarely locked. Abdullahi, who emigrated to the United States from Somalia in the mid-’90s, didn’t have to wait for rides to take him places. He could walk. If he felt like it, he’d join his roommates on the stoop. If not, he’d hang out in his room.

Abdullahi, 36, watched his favorite sci-fi shows on his own small television propped on a red plastic cooler by his bed. Unlike in his old group homes, he could lie in bed and smoke, dropping the butts in an old iced tea container.

Abdullahi’s meds were another casualty of this free-flowing environment. He stopped taking them, giving free rein to his paranoid digressions. In the last weeks of his life, his paranoia was all he had.

The main thread had always been the same. Voices and hallucinations told him there were people out to get him. His enemies list sometimes included his family, sometimes the CIA. One former 7th Street housemate remembered that Abdullahi mentioned that his enemies were from Alaska.

In December, the housemate says, he saw Abdullahi lying on his bed. “He had a butcher knife under [the] covers,” he recalled. Knives were Abdullahi’s standard defense. “He was worried about his roommates,” he says. “He said the roommates were talking in their sleep about him.”

According to friends and court papers, the voices occasionally told him that his only escape from those enemies was suicide. He’d tried that at least once before.

On the morning of Jan. 26, residents say, Abdullahi walked downstairs and stood at the edge of the first-floor bedroom. At his feet, he had a pack of cigarettes and the broken-off handle to the freezer. He was holding a butcher knife.

Grant Osborne, 57, slept in a bed behind the door. He woke up to Abdullahi muttering about enemies just beyond the bay window. Osborne says he didn’t understand any of it. The shades were drawn.

Abdullahi turned his attentions on Lewis Brown, who was in his small single bed positioned near the doorway. He grabbed Brown, 65, from behind and dragged him onto the floor.

“He pulled me off the bed and put the knife around my throat,” Brown says. “He said he was going to kill me and everyone in the house.…He had it around my throat. I put my hand around the knife. I cut my hand.”

Brown held onto the butcher knife as best he could.

Osborne remembers hearing Brown trying to say something. He could barely get out a whisper with the force of Abdullahi bearing down on his neck.

Another roommate called the police.

When 1st District officers reached the steps of the home, they heard what sounded like an assault. The police forced their way inside. Brown says the officers yelled repeatedly to Abdullahi to drop his knife. Brown remembers Abdullahi yelling back at the police that they were going to have to kill him.

Assistant Chief Peter Newsham, who runs the Internal Affairs Bureau, says witness interviews from the scene back up Brown’s account: “I think he yelled something to the effect, ‘You are going to have to take me out! You’re going to have to get me. I’m going out alone.’”

830 7th St. NE(Photograph by Darrow Montgomery)

According to a police press release, Abdullahi confronted the officers with the broken freezer handle and the knife. “Reportedly, the suspect rushed the officers and began to strike one of them with the metal pole,” the department’s release states.

The officer who was attacked opened fire. He got off one shot, striking Abdullahi just below his right eye. Abdullahi was pronounced dead in the small foyer of his 7th Street home. It all happened in a matter of minutes.

Brown was rushed to Howard University Hospital with a bandage on his neck. “I think he just went off,” Brown says. “I don’t think he had all his medicine. He wasn’t taking the medicine. He wasn’t taking any.”

That night, the Department of Mental Health’s (DMH) mobile crisis unit arrived at the home. It found a biohazard. One of the unit’s officials decided to call it in. “There’s still blood on the floor,” said the official in a call to law enforcement. “Nobody’s here except for the people that live here.”

The floor was covered not by carpet, but by a foam cushion. The foam was duct-taped to the floor and stairs. In the kitchen, the sink was stopped up. The garbage disposal switch did nothing. Throughout the house, it was freezing.

The only residents left in the house were Osborne and another roommate. The two employees from mobile crisis persuaded Osborne to abandon the premises. That left one man alone in the building. He quietly closed the door and walked back across the blood, on inside.

The blood and the nonworking heat and the lack of supervision—the whole scene prompted the DMH officials to reach out to the building’s manager, Mark Spence, who finds mentally ill people and places them in his homes. According to city records, Spence runs a nonprofit named Hopefinders Inc.

Spence didn’t answer DMH’s call. The men from the home said they hadn’t seen him in a while.

District officials have since gone about piecing together what led up to the events of Jan. 26. The officer who shot and killed Abdullahi was placed on routine administrative leave pending a probe by the D.C. Police Department. But it’s not just the cops who are doing the detective work this time.

The Department of Mental Health has also launched an investigation into how and why these men ended up at 830 7th St. NE. Since 1999, the city has shut down three of Spence’s District group homes. In 2003, records show, DMH banned its staff from ever putting residents in Spence’s houses.

When asked to comment for this story, DMH Director Stephen Baron referred all questions to department spokesperson Phyllis Jones. “Our investigation is ongoing,” Jones says. “Our responsibility is to the consumer to make sure they are getting the proper care and community support.”

By week’s end Spence would lock the doors to 830 7th St. and evict all his tenants. He refused to say how many more houses he runs. “All I’m going to say is I’m an advocate for these clients,” Spence says. “They make the decision to move into these houses, bottom line. These houses are immaculate when they move in."