They sent him a video of his 14-year-old stepbrother lying on the ground with his ankles and wrists bound and the chilling words: “Do you want the fingers or to mom’s house?”
It was March 4, 2020 and Olalekan Osikoya testified he’d stolen 90 kilos of cocaine about nine months earlier, offloaded most of it to another dealer, pocketed $500,000 and heeded his advice; “Flee or Die.” Now he was getting a terrifying Snapchat from the people he’d ripped off who were holding his little brother hostage and using his phone: “Give up what you stole,” the message said, “and everything will be okay.”
Osikoya would later tell police that during a call, he recognized one of the kidnappers’ voices as Samir Abdelgadir, whom he knew as “Swag.” Testifying over Zoom from an unknown location — still in hiding from the angry drug dealers — he stood by his identification under cross-examination by defence lawyer Manbir Sodhi.
Abdelgadir has pleaded not guilty to kidnapping at the judge-alone trial before Superior Court Justice Sandra Nishikawa.
“He calls me and Samir says, ‘Yo, yo, we’ve got your brother,’” Osikoya told police in his 2020 statement read out in court. “By the time I started recording, he stopped talking, and then he puts it on to a younger kid and he says, ‘We have your brother, you piece of sh-t. You return what you took, or you’re losing your brother. And then they’re sending me videos of him all tied up.”
He told police he then heard a gun being handled. “And obviously my brother is whimpering in the background.”
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The horrifying ordeal began just before 8:30 AM on that March day. His stepbrother (who we’ve agreed not to name) left his family’s Driftwood Ave. townhouse and headed to the parking lot to meet his dad who was going to drive him to school that day – but he wouldn’t make it.
According to the agreed statement of facts, witnesses heard a scream and saw the Grade 9 student being grabbed by two or three Black men, thrown to the ground and forced into a Jeep Wrangler as he yelled, “Help me, help me.“ The driver of the Jeep told the man watching him in the backseat to shoot him if he moved.
Neighbours saw the struggle as the teen was snatched and called 911. Officers responded, but seeing no evidence of an abduction, left the scene.
According to the agreed statement, the boy was taken to an unoccupied 8300-sq.-ft. mansion under renovation at 10 EdgeForest Dr. in Brampton. He was ordered out of the Jeep and told to close his eyes. He was blindfolded with a white T-shirt, his wrists were zip tied and his ankles bound with red rope.
He must have been terrified.
Taken to the basement, he was fed McDonald’s and ordered to give them the password for his phone and his brother’s number. They told him his abduction was because his brother had done “something wrong” to them.
Meanwhile, the boy’s father had left the townhouse complex that morning after assuming his son had taken the bus to school instead of a ride. Later that afternoon, his mom woke from a nap after work to three frantic missed messages from her oldest son about the frightening text he’d received from his stepbrother’s phone.
She started texting the teen, but he didn’t respond. They called his school. He’d never arrived. Their next call was to 911 and an Amber Alert was issued several hours later.
Later that night, the Jeep Wrangler used in his kidnapping was found torched at the Forks of the Credit Provincial Park. It had been stolen in late February.
Thirty-six hours after his abduction, the boy was untied, his clothes were removed, and he was given a reflective construction T-shirt to wear. The barefoot kidnap victim was found abandoned at a barn on a rural property in Brampton wearing nothing but the shirt and his underwear. But luckily, he was alive.
Video seized by Toronto Police from the townhouse complex, passing TTC buses, Hwy. 407 and OPP surveillance eventually led to the arrests of five men. Two have since been murdered and five years later, Abdelgadir remains the only accused.
His trial continues.