Man Sentenced in W. Seattle Attack on Teen Blames It on Four Loko

Ahmed Mohamed, who was sentenced Friday to nearly six years in prison for the attack last year on a West Seattle teen, claimed the caffeine-infused energy beer he drank for the first time the night of the assault was partially to blame.

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Mohamed, 22, pleaded guilty last month to first-degree robbery with a deadly weapon and malicious harassment, the state’s hate-crime statute, for the attack on Shane McClellan on May 25.

According to court documents, McClellan was walking home from a friend’s house around 2 a.m. when Mohamed and Jonathan Baquiring, 21, asked the teen for a light.

When the West Seattle teen, who turned 17 on Friday, stopped, Mohamed and Baquiring attacked him.

For more than four hours, according to court documents, the two men punched McClellan, urinated on him, beat him with his own belt and burned him with cigarettes. They also poured Four Loko on the teen and taunted him by saying, “How do you like it, white boy?” and, “This is for enslaving our people,” according to the charges.

Mohamed, who is black, said in his guilty plea that he and Baquiring targeted McClellan “because he was a different race than we are.” McClellan is white.

Baquiring, who is Asian, has pleaded not guilty to the same charges and is scheduled to go to trial Feb. 22.

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Mohamed apologized to the McClellan family and to his own family for breaking the Muslim custom of eschewing alcohol. He said he felt “peer pressure” to drink and wished he could take back his actions.

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