What happened next Saadi said he’ll never forget. “I thought it was a case of mistaken identity, so I said, ‘I do.’” “Two vehicles cut the bus off and two men in plainclothes jumped onto the bus with guns drawn and one of them yelled in Arabic, ‘Who has the camera?’” Saadi recounted the story during an interview on Tuesday. Saadi had just gotten back onto the bus to take them to a safer neighborhood when the ordeal began. There Saadi was in the summer of his 18th year, taking pictures with his cousins near the fighting at the so-called green line that divided mostly Muslim western Beirut from the Christian majority in east. It was because Saadi’s parents wanted him to value his heritage that he spent summers in Lebanon with relatives at a time in the late 1980s when civil war hostilities made the country a dangerous place. The short version of Saadi’s life story as a first-generation Lebanese-American is he was able to honor his heritage and live the American dream because “Danbury is such a wonderfully diverse city - I love that diversity,” he told Hearst Connecticut Media in 2021, when he was promoted to lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Saadi’s confirmation represents the latest chapter in the story of a Western Connecticut State University graduate who was the state’s veterans affairs commissioner for five years until he resigned last week to serve on the bench. “Whoever is front of me I will treat with fairness and equality.” “I am going to do my best to be diligent in my work and render good decisions in a timely manner,” said Saadi, who was confirmed unanimously by the state House and Senate last week. He’ll have to complete at least four weeks of orientation about the Connecticut court system before he is assigned to a location and given jurisdiction over a “docket,” such as family court or civil cases. It is too soon to say where Saadi will be assigned to begin his eight-year term as a state Superior Court judge. "But the dispensing of justice should be fair and equal regardless of political affiliations or connections.” “The reason I got out of there was because I had connections,” Saadi told Hearst Connecticut Media on Tuesday.
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