Police seek attackers of Louis Farrakhan’s son

By Rudolph Bush Tribune staff reporter Published August 16, 2001, 2:36 PM CDT

Chicago police are looking for several suspects who entered a home on the South Side early this morning and beat and shot Joshua Farrakhan, son of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Joshua Farrakhan, 42, was reported in fair condition at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn this afternoon after being shot in both legs. A female friend who was with Farrakhan at the time of the attack also was beaten, police said.

The woman may have been beaten with a baseball bat, WGN-Ch. 9 reported. Details on her injuries were not available.

The attack occurred about 1:19 a.m. at a house in the 9900 block of South Forest Avenue, said Thomas Donegan, a Chicago police spokesman. Donegan said the investigation was continuing.

Nation of Islam officials had little to say about the shooting at a news conference originally scheduled to discuss a lifting of the United Kingdom’s travel ban on Louis Farrakhan. Leonard Muhammad, chief of staff of the Nation of Islam, said the organization plans to conduct its own investigation of the shooting.

"We’re still ourselves trying to find out information (about the shooting)," Muhammad said. Lewis Myers, an attorney for the Nation of Islam who has known Joshua Farrakhan for 25 years, said he received word of the shooting at 5:30 a.m. "I’m just shocked about it," Myers said.

Neither Myers nor Muhammad would speculate why Farrakhan may have been targeted for violence. They also would not comment about the woman he reportedly was with, or what the two were doing at the house where the attack took place.

Myers did say that Joshua Farrakhan is "very close to his father," and continues to work with the Nation of Islam.

As late as 1996, Joshua Farrakhan was an administrator at the publishing company that puts out Final Call, the organization’s newspaper, but staff members of the paper today would not say if he still works there.

Myers described the younger Farrakhan as "his father’s right hand," one of perhaps 10 people who helped Louis Farrakhan rebuild the Nation of Islam in the late 1970s. When the elder Farrakhan fell gravely ill in March 1999, his son was by his side every day, Myers said.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

-- Anonymous, August 16, 2001