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Aquil Basheer, founder of the BUILD Program and the Professional Community Intervention Training Institute in South L.A., has died.

Known as “The Commander” to admirers and those he mentored, the former Black Panther dedicated his life to mediating gang conflicts and reducing violence.

Aquil Basheer believed that ending gang violence wasn’t the kind of career you just fall into.

“In this type of work, you’re usually chosen. You don’t choose it,” he said in 2024 in an interview for “The Storytelling Project,” an L.A. County Public Health Department project that documented the effects of violence on local individuals and communities.

Basheer, it seems, was among the chosen.

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