Stories from more survivors

Liberians in Minnesota left their shattered homeland behind, but their harrowing memories endure. As a truth and reconciliation process in Africa and Minnesota tries to help the country heal, heartbreaking stories emerge.

Miamen Wopea, 51, Brooklyn Park, Family programs specialist, NorthWest Suburban Integration School District

Miamen Wopea had to duck into the men's room to get a grip on his emotions. When he was least expecting it -- at a peaceful Liberian community meeting in Minnesota -- he saw the man who, years earlier, had tortured him.

Suddenly it was 1989 again, and Wopea was back in the civil war in Liberia, where government soldiers arrested him, choked him with his necktie, beat him, stomped on his hands and stuffed his 6-foot frame into the leg hold of a desk for 24 hours.

The lasting scar came when the soldiers planted several knives in the ground, blade up, and told him he would have to sit down -- hard -- on them one by one if he didn't tell the truth about advancing rebel forces. He took one blade before a soldier recognized him as a former classmate and interceded.

Wopea had been working for the very government that turned on him, as an English teacher and curriculum developer. His crime? He came from Nimba County, where rebel leaders drew support and recruited fighters.

The first arrest was just the beginning. In prison again in 1990, he was No. 8 on a list to be executed. What saved him was a scholarship to study in the United States. The U.S. Embassy negotiated his release and transported him in a diplomatic car to a plane that was set to take off.

Wopea's escape didn't end his nightmare. His sons -- ages 4, 6 and 9 -- had stayed behind with a nanny. Soldiers burned their house. The nanny's sister died in the fire, but the others escaped. In the six months it took them to walk out of the country, the boys learned survival skills such as hiding among dead bodies so they wouldn't be shot. Long after they joined Wopea in Philadelphia, they relived the horror in dreams and flashbacks.

After the confrontation years later in Minnesota, Wopea's torturer apologized. But Wopea said he's not ready to forgive.

Dashward Wumah, 30, Crystal, Student, North Hennepin Community College

The bullets spitting from the AK-47 rifle weren't intended to kill Dashward Wumah's father, just scare him so a rebel could snatch his young niece and keep her for sex.

But James Wumah died the day after the rebel tortured him in front of his sons. And the niece was a broken woman when Dashward saw her again years later.

The ordeal had begun when Wumah's family joined the masses of Liberians fleeing heavy shelling in Monrovia as rebels advanced in July 1990. The family walked for 17 days, carrying bundles of clothes and a large bag of rice. Finally, they stopped at what they hoped would be a safe haven and scrounged for more food.

The rebel confronted Dashward's 13-year-old cousin while she was gathering wild greens. She dodged him and ran back to her family. The rebel followed, brandishing an AK-47 rifle and demanding that she come with him. Dashward's father stepped in.

"That so-called freedom fighter started to shoot around my dad," said Dashward, who stood with his brother watching. "He emptied the whole magazine ... He flashed a knife with blood on it and told us he had just killed someone else."

After torturing James Wumah, the man grabbed the cousin and left.

"He raped her," Dashwood said.

Dashward blames the rebel, but he also blames rebel leader and onetime president Charles Taylor for "putting guns into those hands that killed people." He's also bitter toward Liberia's current president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who supported Taylor at one time.

Darlee Morris, 41, Brooklyn Park, Operates Amanda's Hair Creation

The body of a man clutching a Bible to his chest was Darlee Morris' first warning that she was heading for trouble as she walked out of Monrovia.

"That's when it really hit me that this was war," Morris said.

Morris had known she was taking a chance by trying to cross rebel lines in July 1990. But it was her daughter Amanda's fifth birthday, and Morris hadn't seen her in weeks. After rebels invaded in December 1989, she had sent Amanda to stay with an uncle at a Firestone Rubber facility where there would be more security.

That morning, Morris hid money and jewelry in her underwear and in a bundle on her head. Then she joined a stream of people fleeing the city. A few hours into the journey, she saw many corpses. Still, she kept walking until her route passed a rebel camp.

"Hey, hey, disarm yourself!" shouted a voice from the camp.

She kept walking, hoping he meant someone else in the crowd.

"If you move, I will shoot you," the man yelled.

She stopped. Threatening to spray her with bullets, the man ordered her to undress so he could inspect her body for a tribal tattoo.

"I took down my underwear among the crowd," Morris said. "I started to cry. I was shouting ... I had no choice. Whatever they wanted to see, they would see."

Satisfied that she wasn't from an enemy tribe, the man robbed her of everything she carried and let her go. She stayed in hiding with Amanda until 1993 when there was a lull in the fighting.

After a rocket hit their house in 1995, they left Liberia.

Ben T. Browne Sr., 34, Savage, Medical company technician, managing editor of a Liberian news publication.

The boy couldn't have been older than 10, Ben Browne guesses. And, like everyone else in the crowd on Monrovia's Bushrod Island that day in 1990, he must have been hungry.

His belly was swollen and so were his feet.

Hundreds of people stood with the boy waiting for Prince Y. Johnson, leader of a rebel faction. Soldiers had promised he would distribute rice.

Sure enough, a fleet of jeeps raced to the scene. Johnson jumped out, playing a guitar and singing "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."

The boy dashed from the crowd and ran to Johnson. The rebel leader ordered him to leave. "But like any boy his age, he was eager to know what was happening, so he came back," Browne said.

Johnson stopped singing. "He pulled out a pistol and shot the little boy," Browne said.

Before the body hit the ground, Browne said, Johnson's guards opened fire and pumped more than 30 bullets into the child.

"For what reason, I've got yet to know," Browne said. "This is something I have continuously thought about for years and years. ... This boy was out there looking for food. He was hungry."

Browne himself had been on the run without food because rebels were battling government forces where his family had lived. When the family fled, Browne and his brother took opposite directions. His brother expected to be a target because he was a military pilot with the government forces. He was right. Browne said he learned later that forces loyal to another rebel leader, Charles Taylor, had recognized his brother and killed him.

Grace Crawford, 36, Fridley, Teacher, Ramsey County Head Start.

When news hit Monrovia in 1990 that rebels were advancing to oust Liberian President Samuel Doe, Grace Crawford's family celebrated.

"My uncle was so excited," Crawford recalled. "He thought they were freedom fighters coming to liberate us. He told us to cook for them."

Soon, though, they heard grim stories of slaughter. Others were running for their lives. As the gunfire advanced, Crawford's family ran, too.

Expecting to need cash for their escape, she and her sister braided money into their hair and hid it in the folds of their collars. It didn't last long because they were stripped, searched and robbed along their journey.

Worse yet was the fear of rape. A girl traveling with the family was raped.

So Crawford and her sister tried to make themselves ugly. "I got myself all dirty and ragged so the men would not bother with me," she said.

The trick worked for her but not for her sister, who repeatedly fought off men. There were several close encounters with death, like the time a 14-year-old soldier with an AK-47 rifle held them prisoner and threatened them.

"We got to one place where there was an old man," Crawford said. "He had a little suitcase with a few pitiful clothes in there. They grabbed him, took him behind in the bushes and just slaughtered him. Then they came and showed us a knife with blood dripping from it."

Somehow, Crawford said, she gathered strength despite the horror. "I saw a lot of people being killed," she said. "I jumped over a lot of bodies."

Eventually, they reached a safe haven where their mother had arranged for someone to meet them and take them across a border to Guinea.

Jimmy York, 28, Brooklyn Center, Nursing assistant and student.

Jimmy York's grandmother was exhausted. She and her family had walked for days with almost no food and little water, trying to flee the violence in Monrovia. She had to rest.

"Everybody was standing over her ... she just stopped breathing," York said.

A bloodbath was unfolding back home in Monrovia. Their house had been bombed just hours after they left. Returning for a proper funeral was impossible. Who knew what lurked ahead?

"We just dragged her into the bush and left her," York said.

Down the road, two cousins also died, and the whole family was held captive by rebel forces, beaten and threatened with death.

Finally, the survivors reached what looked like a safe haven. A missionary gave them a room. But rebels fighting for Charles Taylor's insurgency spotted York, who was in his teens at the time. They barged into the house one night, he said, presenting a grim demand: fight for them or be killed.

In the rebel training camp, York was given guns, grenades, pants, a hat and a garish wig to wear in battle, "so you would look very scary," he said. The things he saw while training were "just evil," he said. Babies were beheaded. People were necklaced with tires and burned alive. Throats were slit so that rebels could drain the blood and drink it, he said, in the ritualistic belief that "it makes you strong when you drink the human blood of your enemy."

When York's training was finished, he was loaded with other boys and driven to a city ablaze with gunfire and rockets. The boys were issued drugs to make them brave in battle.

Instead, York and one other boy ran away in the chaos.

He reached Ghana, where the rest of his family had taken refuge, in 1993. Only then did he learn that his father, who had stayed behind in Monrovia, had been hauled to a bridge, bound, pushed into the water and shot.

Fr. James N. Wilson II, 46, Brooklyn Park, Rector at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Minneapolis

Someone had to speak openly against the brutality that had begun consuming Liberia in 1989.

So Rev. James Wilson used his pulpit in Liberia's second largest Episcopal church. He preached the gospel laced with stern admonishments to powerful rebel leaders and to then President Samuel Doe.

"I didn't draw back," Wilson said. "I was hard. I would talk about the killing that was going on ... ethnic hatred [that] was building up. ... Every Sunday I had something to say."

A local radio station broadcast his sermons. Journalists started showing up in the pews -- noting and reporting that he dared to name names and specifically denounce the beheadings and rapes and the massacre that had taken place in a Lutheran church nearby. "Evil slaughter," he called it.

Inevitably, the threats came.

After the second time someone tried to get into his house at night, Wilson moved his family. The radio broadcasts stopped. But the sermons continued. Former friends warned him that he should leave if he wanted to live, if he cared about his family.

"I put my family at risk," he said.

So in 1996, after hundreds of thousands of others had fled, he took his family to Ivory Coast.

A few months later, the church called him back to Monrovia.

But the warnings started again after rebel leader Charles Taylor was elected president in 1997.

Wilson left Liberia that year. He has never gone back.

Wynfred Russell, 34, New Brighton, Entrepreneur and faculty member at North Hennepin Community College

The pistol flashed in the moonlight. Wynfred Russell saw it as soon as he opened the door of the house where he was hiding.

"Instinctively, I put my hand up, and there was this guy with a gun," Russell said. "I grabbed his arm."

Dodging bullets, he wrestled with the drunken rebel for control of the gun.

At one point, the man stuck the gun behind Russell's ear and fired.

Russell deflected the gun barrel but temporarily lost his hearing. Friends heard the shots and rushed to save Russell's life.

Russell was 19 years old when rebel forces invaded Liberia in 1989, cutting him off one day from his home and family.

"I didn't have anything but what I was wearing, no wallet, no extra clothes, not anything," Russell said.

Anarchy surrounded him.

"It was pandemonium, people running helter-skelter, gunfire everywhere," he said. "There were lines and lines of people, just walking, walking."

Russell joined the walkers along roads strewn with decomposing bodies. He headed northwest toward a region where fighting had reportedly quieted. But a few nights after he and friends took shelter in an abandoned house, he was jumped by the rebel commander who tried to shoot him.

The next day, Russell caught a ride in the back of a tractor-trailer and crossed the border into Ivory Coast.

Sharon Schmickle• 612-673-4432