Man sentenced in W. Seattle attack on teen blames it on Four Loko

The Four Loko made him do it.

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.

"He is extremely sorry he committed this act," his attorney, Kevin McCabe, said in King County Superior Court. "It was Mr. Mohamed's first experience with alcohol and an extremely unfortunate type of alcohol to have for your first run-in."

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.

During Friday's sentencing, McClellan's father, Tim McClellan, said he could not stop thinking about the length and severity of the attack.

"It's something I just can't imagine," he said.

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.

In giving Mohamed a sentence at the high end of the standard sentencing range, Superior Court Judge Carol Schapira said the attack was "something very hateful, something very humiliating."

After the beating, Shane McClellan went to the hospital, where a police officer took a statement from him. He described his attackers as a black man and a man who appeared to be Filipino. He told the officer the two men had been drinking Four Loko and smoking Marlboro Red cigarettes, court documents say.

The officer then went to the scene of the beating, where he found blood stains, empty Four Loko cans and Marlboro butts, which he gathered as evidence. On his way back to the precinct, according to court documents, he saw two men who matched the suspects' descriptions.

One of them was trying to hide an open Four Loko can in his pocket, according to the police report. The officer contacted the men and noted they had dried blood on their hands and were smoking Marlboro Reds, according to court documents.

He took swabs of the blood on the suspects' hands, but did not take them into custody at that time, according to police.

The victim's family questioned why the men weren't immediately arrested. Tim McClellan had said he believed the delay wrongly cast doubt on his son's account of the attack.

Seattle Police Department spokesman Sgt. Sean Whitcomb has said it sometimes takes months to build cases that stand up in court.

Mohamed and Baquiring were arrested in September after the state crime lab found Shane McClellan's DNA in the blood taken from their hands.

Four Loko, which has a 12 percent alcohol content, was banned in Washington in November after it was linked to the hospitalization of nine Central Washington University students at a party Oct. 8.

It was also banned by the federal Food and Drug Administration, but it since has been reformulated without the caffeine and reintroduced on the market.

Christine Clarridge: 206-464-8983 or cclarridge@seattletimes.com

Information from Seattle Times archives is included in this report.