In Denmark, certain detention centers are called “secure institutions,” which means they have a fence around them. They have various names and are located all over the country, meant for young people who are supposed to serve jail time but are too young to be incarcerated with adults. In the mid-1990s, young people with Middle Eastern backgrounds began to dominate the population of these institutions, and I was among the first generation of second-generation immigrants who inhabited them.
After the assaults on Baloo, Greve Municipality sent me to The Pinecone, a secure institution located in Jutland, about two hundred miles from Hundige that was given its name due to it being surrounded by nothing but pine trees as far as the eye could see. There, I befriended Wasim, who was from Denmark’s second-largest city, Århus. He was seventeen, and while I only smoked weed, Wasim was addicted to smoking heroin and determined to become a career criminal.
After a week at The Pinecone, we didn’t feel like staying there any longer. When the inmates were called to dinner, we jumped the fence and ran through fields, mud, and forests. We had absolutely no idea where we were going. When we finally came to a small town, Wasim said, “Let’s steal an Opel Kadett.”
Wasim also knew the trick of starting a car with a teaspoon, and luckily, he had brought one with him. Even though neither of us had a driver’s license, we drove the Opel to Århus. There, I found myself with Wasim in an apartment. It turned out to be a drug den where five grown men smoked heroin and were high in a way that made me realize off the bat that I couldn’t stay there much longer.
The next day, Wasim went to see his father, who had settled in Århus with his new wife after being released from prison. My father had family in the city, and they had all sided with him after the attempted murder of my mother and Sarah. While my father was incarcerated, he and my mother had spoken, and he had asked her if there was any chance she would take him back, but Sarah and I had objected.
He kept insisting that he couldn’t remember exactly what had happened, but we refused to believe him. He wasn’t willing to own up to his crime, and we weren’t going to take him back. I had no contact with him, but it was still a love-hate relationship. I still hate my father for all the times he beat me, for what he did to my mother, my sister, and my life. At the same time, I love my father because I will always long for the good father of my early childhood before my grandmother poisoned his mind against his own family. I was suddenly a fugitive in a strange town with nowhere else to go. After all he had done in the past, my father owed me.
“I thought you were in jail?” my father said, surprised to see me.
“I was, but I ran away.”
“What can I do to help you?”
“I need money so I can get home.”
“But they’ll just arrest you again.”
“If you don’t wanna help me, I have no choice but to go stay with the junkies,” I told him.
He had just been released from prison and didn’t want to risk going back for aiding in his son’s escape, but he relented and gave me the cash I demanded from him.
I went home to Hundige, lived on the streets, and resumed my war against the youth club by stealing computers and stereos with my people. We just went inside and took the stereo right off the wall. There were so many of us and we were so aggressive and determined that the employees didn’t even dare to intervene.
This time, Greve Municipality chose to send me to Jutland with a personal escort to live with Sarah and her husband. A few years earlier, Sarah had found herself a big, strong, good-humored man from Lebanon. His name was Karim, and he was about ten years older than she. He had been part of the countless wars between feuding militias and had come to Denmark in 1990. After a long stay at a Danish refugee camp, he had come to Jutland and met Sarah in a neighboring city where he was attending a family meeting. Sarah fell in love. She was a bright and beautiful girl who wanted to leave the hell she called home behind.
After our father had tried to murder our mother, Sarah isolated herself from other people. She didn’t want to stay at the women’s shelter with our mother. She was kicked out of foster care, and when the family moved to Askerød, she also wanted to escape. All this time, Karim had been on her mind. One day, his phone rang.
“Hey. It’s Sarah. How are you?”
“I’m all right.”
One year later, they got married. She was only sixteen and he was twenty-six when they moved in together in Jutland. There was nothing arranged about the marriage. Unlike when our father had attempted to marry her off years before, this was Sarah’s choice. Now the young couple were tasked with having to take care of me.
One summer day, Karim and his buddies took me to the beach with them. One of Karim’s friends got into an argument with a Danish guy, who had flipped them off and shouted, “Fuckin’ perkere!” at them. Karim grabbed a baseball bat from his car and gave the guy a couple of whacks across the legs. That was it. But I was in the car trembling with rage. They call that a beating? I thought.
I jumped out of the car, ran to the beach, and hopped onto a big rock, which put me in the perfect position to kick the man directly in the face. Once the guy went down, I started stomping on him.
“What the hell are you doing? There’s no reason to beat him like that. You’re gonna have to go back home,” Karim said.
Once again, I had ruined it for everyone else by taking things too far. I had been raised to earn love and friendship by proving my loyalty with violence. I thought the way to show my family that I was willing to do anything for them was by beating that guy up. But when they sent me away, it just confirmed the feeling I had of being unwanted everywhere. Because of my actions, a couple of family members went to jail, so I destroyed a friendship while trying to reinforce it.
The Danish dude got beaten up, but nothing serious. Karim got six months’ probation because of it and I was once again in the crosshairs of the Danish prison system.
In the meantime, the real Danish prisons were waiting for me. One day in 1997, when I was fifteen, I was kissing a girl at the mall. If you remember, I had been banned from entering Hundige Mall, so one of the local officers told me to leave the premises immediately. I told the officer to chill and went into a supermarket, hoping the cops would be gone by the time I came back outside. Instead, the officers had put one of my friends, Bilal, in handcuffs. Next, they forced him to the ground, where they beat him with their batons.
“He’s in handcuffs. Stop hitting him,” I said.
“Stay out of it. It’s police business.”
“I don’t care if it’s fuckin’ police business. Leave him alone or deal with me!” I responded.
“Get lost.”
I attacked the policemen, they turned to deal with me instead, and I punched one of them in the face. This gave Bilal the opportunity to escape. The police instead focused their attention on me, the infamous Sleiman. I ran into the supermarket, where I was eventually caught, arrested, and charged with assaulting an officer on duty. At the same hearing for that offense, I was also charged in another case.
To this day, I don’t know exactly why I ended up in prison because I was only fifteen years old at the time. It was more of an adventure than a punishment. I was suddenly surrounded by real, grown-up criminals. I was fed three times a day and had all the time in world to work out. Aside from storing the inmates, the prisons have become training camps for gang members, who go in and build bodies that make them even better equipped to beat people up when they get out. I was no exception. I worked out and did pushups and sit-ups to build my strength so that I would gain respect when I finally got out. The training camp worked. After a month in prison, I was once again fitter and even better suited for combat than I had ever been before.
While I did time, Bilal sued the officers who had handcuffed him. A hearing was held in my case, but now that the officers were being sued in a different case that was connected to mine, they chose not to testify. A possible conviction of the officers could take years, and this meant my original case could not be settled. The judge said he didn’t want a fifteen-year-old boy to spend two years in jail with adult offenders. He thought that the month that I had already served was enough, so I was released right away.