Family Seeks Help in Keeping Dad’s Dream Alive

Abraham Malobe, a father of four who was recently killed, was known for his dreams.

“It actually started with a dream. Abraham – in his culture, dreams are very significant,” said his wife, Jenifer Malobe. “He had a dream of a rabbi praying in a synagogue, and his sister at that time had just passed away in Liberia. So, he felt it was telling him that we needed to look into and research and follow the Jewish faith. So, we started going to services at AA in Buckhead. So, we converted to Judaism and have been practicing ever since.”

They soon became members at Congregation B’nai Torah, where their two oldest children had their bat and bar mitzvahs, respectively.

They had a place in the West End, which at the time was an auto shop that they ran together. But Abraham Malobe had a bigger dream for it – a health food cafe.

“The cafe was a dream of his, to get started and keep running,” said Malobe. “There’s no healthy eating places, really, in that area. He wanted to help, and bring something into the community that would improve it, that would improve the health of the people around him.”

But he would not live to see this dream realized. On March 12, 2025, just a few blocks from the cafe he was still renovating, he was shot and killed. The police have still not identified a suspect.

“APD is releasing his belongings little by little,” said Malobe. “Every time we go pick up more of his belongings from APD property, it just rips the scab off a really, really huge wound.”

The day before this interview, her birthday, was nearly 19 years to the day since she first met him, when she was working as a bookkeeper at a grocery store in Minnesota, and he asked to take her out to celebrate. This birthday, with her son, she had gone to APD property to retrieve Abraham’s cell phones.

“It was hard, yesterday, it was really, really hard. His cell phones were covered in dried blood, and I had to bring them home, and clean them up so the kids could look at some videos and photos that he had taken.”

Still, the cafe itself remains a good memory of all the work they did together as a family.

“The kids and myself were 100 percent involved in every bit of the renovations in that building. That’s what we’ve always done. Every project that we start and take on, we’re all involved in it. Whether it was hauling the concrete, nailing and screwing in two-by-fours for framework, whether it’s painting – every aspect of the renovations, we were a part of.”

The Malobes’ oldest daughter, Isabella, who just graduated from The Weber School, also remembers this communal endeavor, and her father’s role in it.

“He taught us a lot. We gained a lot of skills in different areas, being able to work on the property,” she said. “We did a lot of physical work, which is kind of uncommon, but we helped a lot. Like bricks to build different walls, and maybe helped with plumbing, because our dad knew a lot about building.”

“It brought us all closer as a family,” Isabella said, while noting the difficulty of still coming to terms with her father’s death. “It’s a hard-to-believe situation, because our dad – he was big on helping people, and he always taught us to be good to people and to help people when you can, even when he didn’t have it. For me, it’s a hard situation to understand, that someone would do that to him.”

With her oldest daughter’s graduation, and her two youngest children’s upcoming b’nai mitzvah ceremony, Jenifer Malobe is doing her best to keep managing everything, largely alone.

“I work 10 to sometimes 13 hours a day,” she said. “It’s a lot of life events, major life events going on right now. It has really made it difficult to be able to comprehend that this even happened, and to be able to get through all of this, with not having any support, is a lot.”

The cafe is largely finished, but without Abraham, and with some difficulties paying off their loans for the building, in the worst-case scenario, she may have to sell it.

“It is listed for sale,” she said, “but I don’t want to sell it if I don’t have to.”

“We’ve had it since we were babies, and we’ve seen it evolve from an auto repair shop to now trying to be a cafe,” said Isabella Malobe. “We’ve worked on it and saw our parents work on it since we’ve grown up. It means a lot more than just being a property or a family business, because we’ve put our own effort, and time, and work into it.”

To help in funding the cafe or paying for other expenses, please donate to or share the Malobe family’s GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/718d1b81