Who Killed Gitem Demissie?

When Zelalem Amare’s flight landed in Ethiopia in late March of last year, he was stunned by what he saw. A mass of friends, family and acquaintances were at the airport waiting for Amare and his older brother, Gitem Demissie, to arrive. It was a homecoming, but not a joyful one. Amare was bringing his brother’s body home to be buried.

Earlier that month, 41-year-old Demissie had been murdered in Nashville, gunned down around midnight on March 18, 2017, as he prepared to close the bar and restaurant he owned on Murfreesboro Pike. It wasn’t a robbery gone awry. Police called it a targeted killing, “a true assassination.”

After a large memorial service at Nashville’s Hamerenohe Kidanemihiret Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Antioch, Amare was bringing his brother’s body to their Ethiopian hometown of Gohatsion, where their parents and many relatives still live. It meant a lot to the family, because, says Amare, “They weren’t able to see him for a long time.” He’s speaking to the Scene via phone from Dallas, where he now lives. 

“At least they have something to cry on,” Amare says. After the burial, he spent 40 days building a memorial to surround his brother’s gravesite in Gohatsion, which looks like a small, carefully designed house where Demissie can rest. 

“I did that because I want my family and his friends to visit him, and when they do, they know he’s not dead,” Amare says. “At least there is something to remember him.”

Amare was able to create a peaceful resting place for his brother’s body. But almost a year later, who is behind the killing of Gitem Demissie is a horrific question that is yet to be answered. The case remains unsolved, like dozens of other recent slayings.

According to the Metro Nashville Police Department, of the 111 murder cases in Nashville in 2017, 50 of them — including Demissie’s — remain open as of this writing. Upon the one-year anniversary of a killing, if the department determines that precinct detectives have exhausted all leads in the case, it will be assigned to the Homicide Cold Case Unit. The designation “cold case” is one that Amare and Nashville’s large Ethiopian community have been hoping to avoid. 

Demissie came to the United States around 2004, followed by his brother — who is 10 years younger — in 2007. The two of them, Amare says, had a good life in Ethiopia but had come to America because they “wanted more.” Demissie spent several years working two full-time jobs — one as a worker in a recycling company’s warehouse and the other in home care for the elderly. He slept four hours on a good night. 

Soon, Demissie started working part time at an Ethiopian market, and in 2008, when the owner decided to sell, he bought it. That was Ibex Mart, an Ethiopian grocery store. He and Amare lived and worked together. In 2015, Demissie opened Ibex Ethiopian Bar and Restaurant, the small establishment off Murfreesboro Pike in southeast Nashville where he was ultimately shot to death.

Surveillance video from that night shows a thin man in a light-colored hoodie walk quickly into the restaurant toward Demissie, who was standing behind the bar. Another man was seated at the bar. The man in the hoodie raises his gun and fires multiple times at Demissie, as the man at the bar scrambles to the floor. The gunman walks toward a door at the back of the bar. As he does, he points the gun at the patron but doesn’t fire. He then returns to Demissie, who is still moving, and fires more shots into his body before exiting. 

The man seated at the bar was not shot, and he later told police the assailant was about 5-foot-7 with light skin. Police said at the time that the assailant’s race could not be determined. 

Demissie was rushed to Vanderbilt University Medical Center but pronounced dead upon arrival. He had been shot 10 times. Police soon released their determination that it had been a targeted killing, and it’s hard to draw any other conclusion from the video. The gunman doesn’t look like a frantic thief fleeing the scene of a robbery — he is methodical and apparently deliberate about who he is there to kill. 

Amare had been texting with his brother an hour before the shooting. Demissie was nearing the final stages of a plan to sell the restaurant and take a trip back to Ethiopia. He was also planning to get married, and the two brothers spoke every day. Amare was outside an Ethiopian restaurant in Dallas when he got a call from a friend in Nashville, who told him only that Demissie had been shot and that his brother needed to catch a flight as soon as possible.

Gitem Demissie (left) with his brother Zelalem AmarePhoto courtesy of Zelalem Amare

“I couldn’t control myself,” Amare says. “I recall me falling on the floor. My wife was freaking out because I wasn’t able to tell her what happened, because I kind of passed out. I was talking to him like an hour before that, and everything was fine.”

Soon he got a call from Metro police informing him that his brother had died. 

“He was not only like my brother, he was like my father,” Amare says. “I went to school from 2010 to 2014 at Tennessee State University and got my degree because of him. Because he was pretty much taking care of all my bills and allowing me to spend more time in school.

“Losing someone like that is unbearable.”

Amare has visited Nashville often over the past year to keep up with the case. He says the police have been cooperative, but there isn’t much they can tell him. Because Demissie’s murder is an open case, the MNPD could only refer the Scene to initial police statements about the killing and the previously released surveillance video. 

Community members are still struggling to come up with a possible explanation for the cold-blooded killing.

“I don’t know what kind of enemy he would have to target him like that,” says Tewodros Manaye, an elected leader of the Ethiopian Community Association in Nashville. “But for a working guy to be killed the way he was killed, it was a complete shock. Not [just] for the people who know him, but for the entire community.”

Manaye is speaking to the Scene at the Ethio Coffee House on Murfreesboro Pike, where everyone seems to know him. After Demissie’s murder, Manaye stayed in close touch with the police and was overwhelmed by questions from community members about what had happened. He arranged for counseling for the man who witnessed the killing. In April, the community association wrote a letter to then-Mayor Megan Barry seeking to draw attention to the unsolved murder case. Attached was a petition signed by 1,261 people. 

Manaye says the police appeared to be taking the case as seriously as one would hope. In the weeks and months after the murder, he says he was told that detectives had interviewed around 100 people. He says police told him they had surveillance footage that showed an argument between Demissie and another individual in the restaurant several days before the killing, and that investigators were following a couple of potential leads about business-related disputes. But that was many months ago, and no arrests have been made.  

“There has never been a case like that [in the community] before,” says Father Mesfin Tesemma, the priest at Hamerenohe Kidanemihiret Ethiopian Orthodox Church, where Demissie was a founding member and Amare sang in the choir. “He was well-known by almost everybody, because of his business. Everybody knows him, including children. It was something that nobody expected to happen and that has really affected not only the church members and the Ethiopian community, but also the children who knew him. Because what does that mean? Are we safe?”

The fact that the gunman remains at large, and his motives are unknown, is a continuing source of anxiety for the community, Tesemma says. And figuring out what Demissie might have done to draw animosity, much less brutal violence, is exceedingly difficult.

“I can’t find anyone who can definitively say anything bad about the victim,” MNPD Detective Derry Baltimore said a month after the killing, as reported by WKRN.  

Demissie’s former business partner, Ashenafe Atlaw, tells the Scene that a recent meeting with police detectives gave him hope, even if they couldn’t offer much in the way of details. 

For now, it is as if Demissie was violently snatched away in the night by a faceless, nameless evil. And that means there is little peace for the living. 

“Just thinking about him, it’s not only that he died, but not knowing who did this at this point,” says Amare. “I’m scared for my life too, because I don’t know who’s my enemy or who’s my friend at this point. If you can’t tell who did this, then I can’t tell. I could be eating with my enemy, you know? Because I don’t know who did this at this point. That’s like a second death for me.”