Oct. 1, 2005: Out of violence, then a victim of it

War in her native Liberia separated Vickie Klah from her young children for more than a decade, and then violence in Minneapolis took her teenage son away forever.

Emmanuel Sieh, 18, was shot to death early Sept. 20 near the Greyhound bus station downtown. Police are still looking for a suspect in the slaying, which wasn't random, Minneapolis police Lt.
Lee Edwards said.

Klah, speaking for the first time about the killing of her son, recalled her phone ringing in New Jersey that night.

"I picked it up, and they said Emmanuel had been shot. I thought he was in the hospital. They said he was in the morgue," she remembered as she sat in her sister's Fridley home. In a living room corner, African blankets and pillows were spread for mourning relatives who have been visiting before the funeral today .

After 4 a.m. Sieh and three friends had left a pizza shop near the Target Center. Their car had two slashed tires so they split up to look for a jack, police said. Minutes later Sieh lay dying from gunshot wounds near 9th Street and Hawthorne Avenue N.

Edwards said his detectives have theories about what happened, but he wouldn't discuss them.

It was a violent end to a life that began in a country troubled by civil wars. Although Sieh eventually was able to escape, the transition to life in Minnesota doesn't appear to have been smooth and he's had run-ins with the law.

Klah was separated from her toddler son and baby daughter when fighting erupted in 1988. She left them with her mother one day in a suburb of Monrovia while she went to the capital for food.

But the fighting intensified between rebels outside the city and the government forces within. A no-man's zone was created, trapping Klah in Monrovia. She eventually escaped to neighboring Guinea and from there flew to the Twin Cities and her sister in 1991.

Klah kept in intermittent contact with her mother and children. She said she doesn't know what became of their father. Sometimes her family went into hiding when the fighting grew dangerous. At times it was too risky for her mother to go for mail at the post office in Monrovia, Klah said.

The only way to get her children out was for Klah to gain political asylum here and then petition for her children to come. She hired an attorney and won asylum in 1998, she said. That gave her some protection to go to the neighboring Ivory Coast, where she reunited briefly with her kids in Abidjan during Christmas week in 1999.

"The first time I saw them, they were all grown up," Klah said. "I had only told my mom, so it was a surprise to them. I brought them clothes and shoes, but they were too small to fit the children."

But violence intervened again, cutting her two-week reunion in Ivory Coast to one. "They had a military coup, and my attorney called me and said, `Get out of there,'-" she said. She traveled to Ghana and then Togo before she could get a flight back to Minnesota.

Elated reunion

In February 2002, Klah was waiting at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport outside the sparkling-clear glass door to customs when she saw her children coming down an escalator.

"Emmanuel was so excited to see me," she recalled. "He was screaming, `Mom! Mom!' I said, `There is a glass door!'-"

But the 15-year-old didn't hear and didn't see until he ran head-on into the door. It cracked. He landed flat and still on the floor. "I thought he had died," Klah said. But he revived with only a big bump on his head.

Patricia Sieh, now 17, said Emmanuel helped her with math and science homework. Once when a classmate made unwelcome advances, she told her big brother. He talked to the boy, who stopped bugging her, she said.

Emmanuel loved playing conga drums and singing with their mom and her in the church choir at Joy World Mission in Minneapolis, Patricia said.

Run-ins with law

But Sieh had trouble adjusting to American life and eventually dropped out of school, his mother said. He started ignoring her advice and had friends of whom she didn't approve, Klah said.

She said she wished he had counseling about his war memories from Liberia. He didn't talk about that much but told her it had affected him after he got into legal trouble. Hennepin County Court records show Sieh had several theft convictions and did jail time in the past year.

"He always tried to stay busy and stay out of trouble," Brown said. He said Sieh liked playing soccer and basketball and listening to rapper 50 Cent. He had several jobs, including selling T-Mobile cell phones as a telemarketer and being an Arby's cashier in St. Paul, Brown said.

Klah said her son stayed behind last summer when her husband, a U.S. Navy technician, was transferred to New Jersey. Sieh planned to visit them for Thanksgiving and told his mother by phone that he was thinking about earning his GED so he could join his stepfather in the Navy.