Posted on 04/09/2008 11:59:48 AM PDT by SmithL
On a June night in 1986, police discovered a twice-shot, blood-smeared body spilling out of a red Ford van on Marshall Street in North Oakland.
Police identified the victim as Peter August Kaufman and, according to a brief news report from the time, figured robbery might be the motive. Nearly 22 years later, the killing remains unsolved.
Now, through interviews and documents — including a three-paragraph news account, a death certificate, coroner and police reports and court testimony — the Chauncey Bailey Project has uncovered a link between Kaufman's killing and Yusuf Ali Bey, the late founder of Your Black Muslim Bakery and a fiery preacher who touted the virtues of aggression and called his enemies "devils."
In response to queries from reporters with the project, investigators in the cold-hit unit of the Alameda District Attorney's Office are examining new evidence about Kaufman's killing, Chief Deputy District Attorney Nancy O'Malley said Tuesday.
Kaufman's death is now the seventh slaying tied to the controversial religious leader and his followers during a 40-year period in which no arrests have been made, according to police reports and other records.
Two weeks ago, also in response to Bailey Project inquiries, Santa Barbara police reopened an investigation of a 1968 double killing linked to a mosque there led by Yusuf Bey and his brother, Billy X Stephens, who later changed his name to Raab Muhammad and now lives in Oakland.
The bakery also has been implicated in an eighth killing, the Aug. 2 shooting death of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey, who was working on stories about the bakery when he was killed. A bakery handyman has been charged with murdering Bailey.
The Chauncey Bailey Project discovered the bakery link to the Kaufman slaying by examining a passage from a deposition in a 2003 lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed against Bey, the bakery and Alameda County by a trio of women who'd been raised by the cleric and claimed he'd tormented and raped them while they were children.
Kaufman may have died for stumbling upon one of Yusuf's Bey dark secrets, according to the deposition.
Days before he was shot, Kaufman walked into a bakery bathroom and discovered Bey raping a young boy, according to one woman's testimony.
Within days, the man she identified in testimony only as Usman was "blasted" as he was "sitting in the passenger's seat" of a friend's van.
"I heard him say out of his own mouth "... that he walked into the restroom and saw Brother Bey sexually assaulting this young man," testified the woman, who is identified in transcripts only as Jane Doe 1 because she was a sexual abuse victim.
Kaufman tried to intervene, asking the preacher what he was doing, according to Jane Doe 1.
She said Kaufman discussed Bey's attack with his co-workers, telling them, "I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe what I seen with my own eyes," she testified. The baker "was killed days following that conversation." She testified that she heard Bey's son, Akbar Bey, who was 13 at the time, might have shot Kaufman.
Yusef Bey died of cancer in 2003 while facing 27 felony charges for sexually assaulting minors; Akbar Bey was killed in 1994 in a dispute about $1,200 in marijuana.
Kaufman "was a really nice guy," said Jane Doe 1 in a brief interview last week, adding that she can still "see his face. He was tall and kind of thin."
Oakland police documents show Kaufman was shot in the 6200 block of Marshall Street, about three blocks from the bakery's San Pablo Avenue headquarters.
The officer who found Kaufman noted that he'd fallen out of the "right door of the van." Two bullets had ripped through his skull and torso, shredding his brain and puncturing his heart and right lung.
Kaufman, who was 32 when he died, was born in Oakland but spent his youth in Louisiana. According to his death certificate, he lived at the bakery's compound and worked there seven years.
His mother, who still lives in the Bay Area, said his killing "was very painful." She asked not to be identified because she fears Bey's followers and family.
Jane Doe 1's statements are echoed by those of her sister, Jane Doe 2, who also testified about the man dubbed Usman who was "shot in a van."
Jane Doe 2 portrayed Bey as a sinister character who promised to kill her if she spoke to anyone about his sexual proclivities.
"If you tell anybody,'' she said Bey told her, "you'll be floating in the Bay, you and your family.''
Thomas Peele is an investigative reporter for the Bay Area News Group and A.C. Thompson is an investigative reporter with New America Media. Bob Butler is a freelance reporter. Bay Area News Group staff writers Cecily Burt and Josh Richman and independent journalist Mary Fricker contributed to this report.
bump, there’s just nothing else to say about this, but it’s an interesting on-going story with the Bakery.
I was discussing this case with some friends as we were sitting in Your White Christian Steakhouse.
Don’t you mean, “White Christian Pork roll House?”
All right: White Heterosexual Christian Steak & Chop House
Your Black Muslim Bakery has a website...
It doesn’t say anything about Dr. Bey being on the down low, though.
According to his death certificate, he lived at the bakery's compound and worked there seven years.
A bakery has an associated "compound"?????
I suspect more linkages will be found, and more cases re-opened. I think using Bey’s pedophilia is a solid starting point which will ultimately lead into many other directions, and re-raising other “cold cases”. Over time, IMHO, what has brought CA (the Bay Area, specifically) to its coarse, corrupt, economically fragile, and grotty condition will become clearer and clearer.
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