Nurul Shah Alam, a nearly blind Rohingya refugee, was left alone in a Buffalo parking lot. His death has been ruled a homicide – what now?
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n 19 February, the second day of Ramadan, Mohamad Faisal Nurul Amin and his family gathered to pray before sunrise in their apartment on the outskirts of Buffalo, New York. After nearly a year of waiting, they believed their family would be together again. Amin’s father, Nurul Shah Alam, 56, was coming home.
“For the first time since we arrived in America, I felt happy,” said Fatima Abdul Roshid, Shah Alam’s wife, speaking through an interpreter. “I thought my husband would be with our two sons and me for Ramadan.”
In December 2024, Roshid and two of their sons moved from Malaysia to Buffalo, part of a resettlement effort for ethnic Rohingya people. The Muslim minority has long faced violence in Myanmar (formerly Burma). Three of Roshid and Shah Alam’s other sons remained in Malaysia, waiting for admission to the United States. Shah Alam, who had lost much of his sight during a childhood accident, was weak after spending months in the Erie county detention center because he’d mistakenly wandered into an area resident’s backyard and was arrested by authorities.
