ROCHESTER — A Rochester man was found incompetent this week to stand trial on allegations that he repeatedly shot a man in November 2019.
On Monday, Jan. 31, 2022, Olmsted County District Court Judge Lisa Hayne found 41-year-old Abdusalam Omar Hussein incompetent.
Hussein had pleaded not guilty to a charge of second-degree assault. He had been found competent in January 2020.
In February 2021, Hussein’s attorney filed a motion that he would present a defense of not guilty by reason of mental illness or cognitive impairment. About a week later, a second evaluation was ordered to determine if Hussein at the time of the alleged crime he was “laboring under such a defect of reason as not to know the nature of the act or that it was wrong.”
Court records do not list outcome of that evaluation.
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A third competency evaluation, which like the first was to determine if Hussein was competent to understand the court proceedings, was ordered in November 2021. On Monday, Hayne found Hussein incompetent.
Police were called about 6:30 a.m. Nov. 3, 2019, to an apartment complex in the 1300 block of Fourth Avenue Southeast for a report of a shooting. When officers arrived, they found a 25-year-old man who had been shot four times in the legs and once in the hand, according to court records. He was taken to Mayo Clinic Hospital-Saint Marys with non-life-threatening injuries.
The man identified his assailant as Hussein.
About 7:20 a.m. that same day, Police say Hussein called 911 and said that he was a child soldier suffering from a mental issue and that someone made him shoot the victim.
