On March 29, 2022, in Columbia, South Carolina, Adaam Abdussalam, a 26-year-old man from Salley, was shot multiple times outside the Park Apartments on Longcreek Drive. In the quiet minutes just after midnight, deputies from the Richland County Sheriff’s Department were dispatched to the complex for reports of gunfire. When they arrived at 1601 Longcreek Drive, in the St.
Andrews area near Broad River Road and Interstate 20, they found Abdussalam lying outside an apartment building with numerous gunshot wounds. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, but despite emergency treatment, he was pronounced dead a short time later.
By the next day, the Richland County Coroner, Naida Rutherford, publicly confirmed his identity and hometown, formally linking his death to the shooting at the Park Apartments. Authorities emphasized that the attack unfolded just outside the complex, not inside a particular unit, underscoring how suddenly violence had spilled into a shared outdoor space that residents passed through every day. The Park Apartments, a modest, densely populated community off Longcreek Drive, sit along a corridor of working-class housing, commercial strips, and busy roads that connect quickly to the rest of Columbia, making the site both heavily trafficked and, as neighbors would later suggest, vulnerable.
Abdussalam’s killing did not happen in isolation. Just weeks earlier, on February 19, 2022, nineteen-year-old Saveon Robinson had been shot and killed in the same complex, another fatal encounter that occurred outdoors near the apartments. Community organizer Javar Juarez told local reporters that the repeated violence reflected deeper problems: substandard housing, a lack of community resources, and residents struggling simply to remain housed and feed their families. He argued that these conditions left people living in an environment where crime felt less like a series of isolated tragedies and more like a symptom of chronic neglect. Juarez had pushed for tangible changes—turning Longcreek Drive into a one-way road, adding better lighting and police cameras—but, he said, those proposals had not been acted on, and neighbors were left to endure both grief and anxiety as another life was lost at the same address.
Investigators moved quickly to process the scene and interview witnesses, but concrete answers proved elusive. The Richland County Sheriff’s Department described the March 29 shooting as an isolated incident and said it did not believe the attack on Abdussalam was connected to earlier shootings in the area, including the separate 2021 killing on Longcreek Drive in which two people, Travis Lamar Mitchell and Vashaun Alija Gaulman, had already been arrested and charged with murder. In Abdussalam’s case, deputies said the investigation was ongoing and later told reporters that persons of interest had been identified, but they did not release names or provide specific details about those individuals’ alleged roles. Public appeals urged anyone with information to contact Crimestoppers, a sign that investigators were still seeking witnesses and leads. As of the latest available reports, authorities had not announced any arrests or filed public charges specifically tied to Abdussalam’s death, leaving the identity and motive of the shooter officially unresolved.
In the months and years after the shooting, Abdussalam’s name quietly joined the long list of people in Columbia recorded as victims of gun violence. Entries in national databases and advocacy sites catalogued him as a 26-year-old killed by gunfire in Columbia on March 29, 2022, and his case was added to compilations of incidents tracked by organizations like the Gun Violence Archive. On an online memorial, family and friends remembered him not in terms of police reports or case numbers, but as a deeply religious, artistic, funny, and helpful person who loved his family and friends without limits. They lit digital candles, left brief messages of love and grief, and vowed to keep his name alive, even as official statements remained focused on tips, persons of interest, and an investigation still seeking the person responsible for the shots that ended his life in the early darkness outside the Park Apartments.
