The shooting and stabbing of a Bhutanese refugee April 7 is driving outreach efforts to provide language-specific safety and crime prevention brochures to small immigrant groups who live in the Alief and Sharpstown areas.
Members of the Houston Asian Community Crime Advisory Board and the Greater Sharpstown Management District are locating funds to help pay for the project, said Kenneth Li, who chairs GSMD’s safety and security committee.
“We need to stop this thing. There are 100 of these families, some of them newcomers, and they don’t know how to ask for help,” Li said at the GSMD committee’s April 16 meeting.
The assault occurred about 5 a.m. April 7 as the 23-year-old was waiting for a bus on Ranchester Drive to go to work, said Chris Colaneri, a resettlement program manager with Alliance for Multicultural Community Services.
Colaneri said it was the young man’s third day at his new job with a hotel and his first attempt to take the bus to work.
The alliance began searching for the young man after family members reported he didn’t return home that day, Colaneri said.
They did not learn his fate for a couple of days, when a nurse at Memorial Hermann in the Texas Medical Center suspected her patient may be a refugee and began telephoning Houston’s resettlement agencies, he said.
The young man’s injuries still have prevented him from helping in the police investigation of the assault, said Sgt. Connie Rico with Harris County Precinct 5 Constable’s Department.
Colaneri said the effort by the management district and the Asian community is welcome.
“The apartment owners have been very helpful working with us. Getting information to the residents, if it is simple and in their language, it’s very helpful,” Colaneri said.
His organization, an agency of the United Way, has helped more than 500 Bhutanese refugees relocate to the U.S. in the past couple of years. Many of them were forced to leave their homeland 20 years ago and lived in camps in Nepal before qualifying for resettlement in this country.
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