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“I have to move now,” he adds. “I can’t have my family in this house when I get out (of the hospital). They could come back. Or they could kill somebody else.

“I don’t know where I’m going to go. I’m going to go somewhere safe. I have four kids.”

Hussein thinks the men involved in his shooting were the same ones he noticed earlier in the day, walking back and forth outside the Belfast Road Mr. Tire garage he owns and talking with someone in a black car. In the past, he said, thieves have stolen catalytic converters from cars on his lot after hours, and he thought these men might have had similar intentions.

Hussein said it was too late to make a bank deposit when he left work a little after 7 p.m., so he took the day’s receipts home with him. Additionally, his own car had a flat tire, so he borrowed a customer’s Lexus instead, something he says he occasionally does for e-tests and such.

When he pulled into the driveway of his Gracewood Crescent home and opened the car door, two men were standing beside the car. “One had a gun in his hand,” he recalls. The other stood behind, his face covered and hands buried in his coat pockets.

The gunman asked Hussein for his money, and as Hussein reached inside his coat, his elbow hit the car’s steering wheel and pressed against the horn. “When the horn went beep, it startled me, and he said, ‘No no no no no no.’ And then I pushed the horn — BEEEEEP! — and then he shot.”

The first shot grazed the inside of Hussein’s left knee. Hussein again urged the man to relax as he handed him the money. “And instead of taking the money, the guy behind him took the money, and the guy in front said, ‘More’ and shot again. I said, ‘Why did you shoot me? I gave you the money.’