BY EMILY GURNON
Pioneer Press
Friday, April 13, 2007
A man charged with vehicular homicide in the deaths of two Somali women last month has traveled to China and prosecutors fear he plans to stay there, the Hennepin County Attorney's Office reported today.
Fei Ni, 23, of Brooklyn Park, posted $100,000 bail after his attorney argued that he had extensive family and connections in the Twin Cities, and therefore did not present a flight risk, said Assistant County Attorney Paul Scoggin.
But Scoggin had asked when his office charged Ni that the defendant's passport be surrendered. The judge deleted that requirement, Scoggin said.
Ni is not in violation of the law at this point, but will be if he skips his next court date, scheduled for April 20, Scoggin said.
"We just have good reason to believe he's fled the country," Scoggin said. "We're greatly concerned about that."
Scoggin declined to say how he knew Ni was in China, or whether Ni was a Chinese national.
The United States does not have an extradition treaty with China, the prosecutor said.
Ni was the driver of a Lexus SUV that was traveling westbound on Highway 62 near the intersection of Highway 169, close to the border of Eden Prairie and Edina, in the early morning hours of March 11. Witnesses told investigators that the SUV passed traffic on the right, then turned across three lanes and began heading eastbound - still in the westbound lanes, the criminal complaint said.
The Lexus collided head-on with a Plymouth Breeze driven by Halimo
Mohamud, 31, an Eden Prairie mother of seven. She and her passenger, 61-year-old Barni Ahmed of Eden Prairie, both died, the complaint said.
The women had escaped the civil war in Somalia and were trying to build new lives in the Twin Cities, a local activist said.
When police pulled Ni from the Lexus, they noticed a strong smell of alcohol on his breath, the complaint said.
He was charged with two counts of criminal vehicular homicide.
A court spokeswoman confirmed that Patricia Belois, the judge who initially signed the criminal complaint against Ni, crossed out the prosecutor's condition that Ni surrender his passport. But she also doubled the bail to $200,000.
At a subsequent hearing, a second judge, Denise Reilly, cut the bail back to $100,000. But the prosecutor present at the hearing did not make an argument for the passport surrender, the spokeswoman said.
Ni's attorney did not return a phone call late Friday.
Source: Pioneer Press, April 13, 2007