Abubacarr Darboe, a 22-year-old Black/African American man, was fatally shot on the night of December 20, 2025, while home in Madison, Wisconsin, for the holidays. Although some early reports listed him as 21, the Dane County Medical Examiner’s Office and Madison police identified him as 22. Known to family and friends as “Buba,” Darboe had been born in The Gambia and later grew up in Madison.
He graduated from Madison East High School, where he was known as a talented soccer player, and was attending Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. He was studying economics and business and was expected to graduate in May 2026, only months after his death.
Darboe had returned to Madison only a few days before the shooting to spend the holiday break with his family. On the evening of December 20, he went to visit two of his brothers. Shortly after 10:30 p.m., they were traveling in a vehicle along the 3500 block of Portage Road on Madison’s north side when another vehicle approached and gunfire was directed at them. Police later said the victims reported that they were driving on Portage Road when occupants of another vehicle began shooting at their vehicle. Darboe and one of his brothers were struck by the gunfire, while a third brother escaped without being physically injured.
Rather than waiting for an ambulance, another man drove the two wounded victims to a local hospital. Darboe’s injuries proved fatal, and he died as a result of the shooting. His wounded brother, identified in overseas reporting as Modou Lamin Darboe, survived and was later released from the hospital. Their other brother, Abdoukarim Darboe, was not wounded. Investigators responding to the shooting recovered a firearm and multiple shell casings from the area, and the Madison Police Department immediately began treating the case as a homicide.
Investigators quickly developed information about the vehicle believed to have been involved in the attack. By early Sunday morning, December 21, detectives had identified the suspect vehicle and traced two people considered persons of interest to a residence on Milwaukee Street. Both were taken into custody and booked into the Dane County Jail. However, police specifically reported that they were jailed on Wisconsin Department of Corrections warrants rather than homicide charges related to Darboe’s death. Authorities did not publicly identify the two people in the reports surrounding the homicide.
People close to Darboe’s family said they believed the shooting was a tragic case of mistaken identity. Family sources said the three brothers did not know the suspected shooters and had no known dispute or previous conflict with them. Their belief was that whoever fired on the brothers’ vehicle had mistaken them for other people. Former Wisconsin state representative Samba Baldeh, a family friend who had known Darboe while he was growing up, similarly said there was no indication Darboe had been involved in criminal activity and expressed the belief that he may simply have been caught in a terrible mistake.
The killing deeply affected Madison’s Gambian community. Darboe was remembered as an ambitious student who had successfully balanced academics, athletics and community involvement after immigrating to the United States. He had returned home looking forward to spending time with family before completing his final months at Vanderbilt. Instead, relatives received word only hours after he went to see his brothers that he had been critically wounded. His funeral drew family, friends and members of the Gambian community, while a memorial fundraising effort was established with plans to support charitable work, including a mosque and orphanage in The Gambia, in his memory.
The Madison Police Department’s publicly available incident record identifies the case as homicide investigation 2025-555002 and continues to describe it as an active investigation. The latest publicly posted police update states that the two persons of interest were taken into custody on unrelated Department of Corrections warrants, but it does not announce homicide charges against either person. Available online reporting likewise does not identify a suspect who has been formally charged, tried or convicted of killing Darboe. As a result, the publicly documented case remains an unresolved homicide, with investigators still seeking information that could establish who fired into the brothers’ vehicle and hold the responsible person or people accountable.
